Political Representation and Economic Conditions - The Impact of Local Economic Conditions on Attitudes Toward Political Representation in Germany
Rabuza, Florian / Bollow, Uwe
It is often assumed that national economic evaluations play a crucial role in the formation of political opinions. However, people actually never face national economic conditions directly. Otherwise one would not find patterns of regional variation. Furthermore, economic crises never affect the country as a whole but rather impacts on regional clusters with common economic structures and interdependencies. Therefore, we believe economic evaluations to be first and foremost shaped by local economic conditions that people face in their daily environment. Prior research on political trust or satisfaction with democracy suggests that generalized considerations like the latter are heavily dependent on national economic conditions. Recently, scholars have begun to discuss the role of local or geotropic economic factors in the process of citizens'' attitude formation. Accordingly, we expect an impact of objective local characteristics (e.g. unemployment rate, per-capita income, impact of financial crisis) on citizens’ perceptions of representation. In order to test our assumption we run a multi-level regression model of the feeling of being represented that includes both, district level variables and individual orientations.
