Table 4.

Descriptive statistics

Variable	Type	Number of observations	Mean	Standard deviation	Mini-mum	Maxi-mum
Unemployment: net difference	Continuous; net difference personal estimate minus value official statistic	37,207	4.29	6.58	− 26.5	25
Inflation: net difference	Continuous; net difference personal estimate minus value official statistic	32,574	4.32	5.27	− 8.6	22.61
Growth: net difference	Continuous; net difference personal estimate minus value official statistic	25,175	1.06	3.94	− 13.3	16.4
Education	Ordinal; ranging from 0 (= ended full-time education < 15 years old) to 4 (= > 25 years old)	61,454	2.78	1.29	0	4
Financial situation	Ordinal; ranging from 0 (= very bad) to 3 (= very good)	61,246	1.62	0.76	0	3
Occupation	Nominal; divided into 8 professional categories	63,092	4.85	2.17	1	8
Political ideology	Ordinal variable derived from individual self-placement; from 1(= far left) to 5(= far right)	49,730	2.96	1.09	1	5
Ideological distance from incumbent government	Continuous; absolute difference ideological self-placement minus ParlGov’s placement of incumbent government (both on 1–10 scale)	45,646	2.26	1.62	0	7.6
Trust statistics	Dichotomous variable; 1 = tend to trust, 0 = tend not to trust	56,743	0.53	0.50	0	1
Discuss politics	Ordinal; from 0 (= never discuss political matters) to 2 (= frequently discuss political matters)	62,351	0.95	0.66	0	2
Nr economic issues mentioned among most important two	Continuous; from 0 to 2	63,092	1.06	0.73	0	2
Economic outlook	Ordinal; from 1 (= worse) to 3 (= better)	58,692	2.02	0.74	1	3
EB2015 dummy	Dichotomous; 0 (= 2006 wave) or 1 (= 2014 wave)	63,092	0.52	0.50	0	1
Female	Dichotomous; 1 = female respondent	63,092	0.55	0.50	0	1
Age	Continuous; age in years	63,092	47.89	18.25	15	99
Age square	Continuous; square term of age in years	63,092	2,626.93	1,813.24	225	9,801