Abstract
Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.
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Notes
The 2008 ANES included in a split-half sample a new question to tap prospective voting. The new questions generally support the findings we report here, but the question format raises serious concerns about endogeneity. We report only the 1980–2004 results and present the 2008 results in an appendix.
Gomez and Wilson (2001) use candidate preferences in the ANES pre-election survey. It appears that the primary methodological reason for using candidate preference is the small number of observations on vote intention or vote choice that results from dividing the sample into four information levels, the lower of which have low turnout numbers. The use of a pooled seven-election data set affords us the luxury of overcoming such concerns by having large numbers of respondents in every information category.
Including major third parties or including all third parties as challengers in the models that follow does not change the results.
In 2000 the question read: “Do you expect the economy, in the country as a whole, to get better, stay about the same, or get worse?” The 2008 ANES contained a split-half design in which half of respondents answered the standard prospective question and the other half answered a new question asking respondents whether they believe the economy will get better or worse under each of the presidential candidates.
Some studies find different effects of the “better” and “worse” responses when included as separate dummy variables in a model, but we find that these differences are not generally statistically significant. Coding each evaluation on a single scale of −1, 0, 1 eases interpretation of the interaction effects and reduces the number of variables in the model.
Lanoue (1994) introduced this construction of prospective evaluations in his study of the 1984 and 1988 presidential elections. Duch et al. (2000) use a similar method to find in the 1992 presidential election that respondents’ predictions about the election winner partly explain retrospective and prospective sociotropic evaluations of the economy.
In the compiled dataset, only 130 cases are missing values for the interviewer information measure, making it a valuable measure across the years since 1980.
No other measure of voter information is available across elections due to changes in the content of the factual questions. The battery of questions used by Gomez and Wilson (2001) and Godbout and Belanger (2007a) is available starting only in 1988 and varies over the years in its focus on domestic political leaders, foreign leaders, media personalities, and political institutions and processes. The battery of factual questions also produces more missing cases than the interviewer rating.
The results are unchanged using the seven-point party identification scale. We use the three-category variable to facilitate partisan interactions in a subsequent model.
For the many cases of unreported income in the ANES data, we used multiple imputation to generate predicted values.
The model with pooled years includes standard errors clustered by year.
The 2000 election is also dropped from this analysis since the ANES question about the election outcome does not distinguish between the Electoral College and popular vote winners, which were different in 2000.
A one unit change in each of the economic evaluations corresponds to a change from believing the economy was (or will be) worse to it was (or will be) the same, or from believing the economy is the same to believing it will be better. A one unit change in political information corresponds to a change of two standard deviations on the information scale.
One concern with the results may be possible high correlations among the economic evaluations. The highest correlation (\(\tau _b\)) among the four economic evaluations is .255 between retrospective national and retrospective pocketbook evaluations. All other correlations among the economic evaluations are between .10 and .22.
Coding the key independent variables on −1, 0, 1 scales and presenting graphs for all of their combinations avoids problems of interpreting interaction effects in logit models pointed out by Ai and Norton (2003).
These results are consistent with Godbout and Belanger (2007a). In Table 4 of their article, which presents the results for post-election recalled vote, the critical test is whether the coefficients for sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations differ between information groups, which in their model are scaled as 0 = lowest information and 1 = highest information. This difference is not statistically significant in their analysis for either sociotropic or pocketbook voting in any year, which is exactly what we find.
Prospective pocketbook evaluations are also statistically significant for the least informed voters when the challenger is expected to win, but the effect is negative.
We also estimated models with a voter’s education level and income in place of information. The results are substantively the same as for information, but the model with information outperforms the model with education or income based in Akaike’s Information Criterion.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, September 2007. We thank Mike Alvarez, Bob Lupton, Suzanna Linn, Jonathan Nagler, Herbert Weisberg, Gerald Kosicki, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and Vince Hopkins for assistance. Christenson would like to thank Ohio State University’s Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Survey Research for a summer fellowship to pursue this research.
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Lacy, D., Christenson, D.P. Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting. Polit Behav 39, 347–375 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9359-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9359-3