Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support: Rival Models Reconsidered

Abstract

The argument that personal economic expectations drive support for British governing parties has received wide attention. This article employs aggregate data for the 1979–92 period to assess the effects of personal expectations, other subjective economic variables and evaluations of prime ministerial performance in rival party-support models. Analyses of competing models, including error correction specifications that take into account nonstationarity in the time series of interest, indicate that the personal expectations variants generally do very well, although they do not outperform one or more alternatives incorporating other types of economic evaluations. The error correction models show that the prime minister's approval ratings have significant short-term and long-term effects on governing party popularity.