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Cyclical accountability

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Abstract

A large body of literature has investigated vote and popularity functions, identifying the factors influencing presidential approval ratings or presidential votes. The studies have revealed a strong correlation between the state of the economy and incumbent support. However, so far, less attention has been paid to when voters relate their perceptions of the president’s performance to the real-world economy in a systematic way. While some research focuses on voters’ behavior on Election Day, other studies do not take electoral cycles into account. Hence, while politics often is assumed to follow a “political business cycle”, it is less clear whether voters follow the same logic in holding incumbents accountable for economic conditions. In this article, we offer a systematic study of the timing of accountability mechanisms in the domain of the economy. The analyses show strong patterns of accountability throughout the electoral cycle.

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Notes

  1. In this study, we focus on the US case. Hence, for now at least, we refer to the president as masculine.

  2. See www.executiveapproval.org.

  3. In the main analyses, we do not adopt a lag structure because we work with monthly averages for both presidential approval ratings and unemployment rates. We also tested for lagged effects of one and two months. Those analyses resulted in substantially the same findings as the ones presented herein. See the robustness section below for more information about the additional tests.

  4. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the unemployment rate as follows: “The unemployment rate represents the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force. Labor force data are restricted to people 16 years of age and older, who currently reside in 1 of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, who do not reside in institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces”.

  5. The presidency traditionally starts on 20 or 21 January. If an opinion poll taken between 20 or 21 January and 31 January enters the dataset, we incorporate the approval ratings in the February average.

  6. If a term ends earlier unexpectedly, we code the months up to the end of the term. If a term starts unexpectedly, we code the months from 1 up to the next election—and then start a new cycle, independent of whether the former vice president or a new president was elected. In total, we have data for 20 presidents at the start of their term, and 15 full presidential cycles. It needs to be noted, however, that incomplete terms might bias the results because such presidencies did not follow the standard and expected cycle. Therefore, we replicated the main analyses excluding terms that ended or started unexpectedly. The results, reported in Online Appendix H, show that our main findings remain stable even when excluding those specific terms.

  7. More precisely, we include as “positive” events (+1): Cuban missile crisis, Paris Peace Accords, Mayaguez incident, Camp David Accords, Carter Iran crisis (start of hostage crisis), Grenada invasion, end of Gulf War, terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. We include as “negative” events (−1): Carter Iran crisis (end of hostage crisis), Iran Contra, and the Nixon Watergate scandal. In deciding what events to include, and which months to assign to them, we adopted the rule that any increase of more than 10% is included until the approval rate dropped again within the 10% range.

  8. See https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/.

  9. See Online Appendix G for a list of the exact question wording.

  10. While these data are available for quarterly intervals from 1960 on, monthly data are available only from 1978 on, further limiting the time horizon of our analyses. Hence, while these analyses will provide some insights into the underlying mechanism, the number of observations is small and the results should be interpreted with caution.

  11. In Online Appendix B, we include the replication of Fig. 1 for each president separately.

  12. Note that we use a local polynomial smoother to get an indication of the general pattern in citizens’ responsiveness to employment. The confidence intervals are based on the distribution of the correlations. In Online Appendix C, we display the raw correlation coefficients along with their confidence intervals.

  13. See also Online Appendix C for the figures displaying only the raw correlations. Those figures also show the confidence intervals around the estimates. As we have only a small number of observations, unsurprisingly, the confidence intervals are very wide, almost ranging from the minimum to the maximum possible value. That again raises caution in interpreting the results.

  14. As an additional test for president-related factors, we also calculated the partial correlations including president fixed effects. The results, reported in Online Appendix E, align with those presented here.

  15. That is, it is possible for public interest to wane after some months, but that midterm elections increase voters’ interest in the economy, making it seem as if it remains stable.

  16. Only a tentative finding, however, because it is based on a very small number of observations.

  17. Note that we cannot use the Consumer Price Index as an indicator of the inflation rate as in the past decades it increased almost linearly, resulting in a lack of variation.

  18. We repeated this analysis by replacing the absolute approval rate by the difference in the approval rate as compared to the previous month, but also in this analysis no clear patterns emerge.

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Funding

Dieter Stiers acknowledges the funding of the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO).

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  1. Centre for Political Science Research, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Dieter Stiers

  2. Department of Political Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Anna Kern

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  1. Dieter Stiers
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Correspondence to Dieter Stiers.

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Stiers, D., Kern, A. Cyclical accountability. Public Choice 189, 31–49 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-020-00856-9

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