Layered Economies: Heterogeneity in Economic Conditions and Evaluations

Dani Marinova (Universitat Autònoma Barcelona)

20th february 2018, 15:00h, Sala de Juntes de la Facultat de Ciència Política i Sociologia de la UAB
“Research in political economy relies on a limited number of indicators to characterize economic conditions. This paper is to revisits the assumption that a handful of macroeconomic indicators provides objective and universal accounts of ‘the state of the economy’ at a given point in time. We argue that the measures typically used in models of retrospective economic voting are only partial, can be contradictory, and may in some cases be misleading. Variation in economic conditions within a nation triggers meaningful differences in both to knowledge and evaluations of the economy across segments of society. These differences are due to objective variation in economic conditions rather than individuals’ subjective perception of the economy. Preliminary analyses suggest that objective meso-level economic conditions are far better at pre-dicting retrospective evaluations of economic performance than are standard macroeconomic indicators. Results suggest that political economy has much to gain from accounting for the lay-ered economies which structure political behavior“