Economic Perceptions and Electoral Choices: A Design-Based Approach

Abstract

Do economic perceptions affect voters’ electoral choices? There is ample evidence showing a correlation between how people perceive the current state of the economy and electoral decisions. However, there are reasons to believe that political preferences can also determine how voters evaluate economic conditions, which will reverse the causality arrow. The strategies previously implemented to address this problem have been based on the use of structural equations and instrumental variables, but they require very strong parametric or identification assumptions. In this paper, I follow a design-based approach by emphasizing the study design rather than statistical modeling. In contrast to previous studies that used the same panel data in Brazil, I find evidence that supports egotropic, rather than sociotropic, voting. This finding shows that traditional research designs may be overstating the magnitude of sociotropic economic voting.

Introducción Número Especial: OUTLIERS OF PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL: DYNAMICS, LEVELS, AND RATES

“…These articles contribute to a growing literature on the dynamics of approval in presidential systems (e.g., Arce and Carrión, 2010;Carlin, Carreras and Love, forthcoming;Cuzán and Bundrick, 1997;Carlin, Hartlyn and Martínez-Gallardo, 2012;Johnson and Schwindt-Bayer 2009;Pérez-Liñán, 2007) by highlighting a set of factors that explain why some presidents deviate from the typical cyclical pattern. In line with previous research on economic voting in Latin America (e.g., Boelhouwer Menezes, 2018;Benton, 2005;Cabezas, 2015;Cabezas and Navia, 2010;Echegaray, 2005;Gélineau, 2007;Johnson and Schwindt-Bayer, 2009;Lewis-Beck and Ratto, 2013;Love and Windsor, 2018;Luna, 2002;Menezes, 2018;Murillo and Visconti, 2017;Singer, 2013Singer, , 2015Singer and Carlin, 2013;Visconti, 2017), all of the authors in this special issue agree that economic outputs -and economic perceptions of performance-go a long way in explaining patterns of executive approval. Also in line with previous work (Powell and Whitten, 1993), some of the articles find that institutions can alter patterns of approval.…”

Reevaluating the Role of Ideology in Chile

“…Of course, the nature of a conjoint experiment, in which respondents evaluate hypothetical candidates, raises the question of whether respondents would make the same decisions in real life. Nevertheless, different studies have validated results from conjoint analyses by comparing them with behavioral benchmarks in Switzerland (Hainmueller et al 2015) and Chile (Visconti 2018).…”

“…Even though ideology may seem to have been relegated to a lesser role in citizens' electoral decisions, recent findings show that ideological labels may still be important to Chilean voters. For example Visconti (2018) provides evidence from the combination of a natural and a survey experiment to show how voters from a low-to-middle-income locality in northern Chile use ideological labels to identify the candidate most likely to pass the policies they need after a natural disaster.…”

Partisanos estoicos. El condicionamiento político de las percepciones económicas en Uruguay

“…National economic perceptions are a relevant issue in Latin American political behavior, as several works suggest the existence of sociotropic economic voting (Lewis-Beck and Ratto, 2013;Singer and Carlin, 2013). However, Latin America remains mostly unexplored regarding the influence of partisanship on economic perceptions except for Visconti (2017) and Samuels and Zucco's (2018) work. Visconti's (2017) article provides evidence from observational data of partisan bias in economic perceptions in two minor Brazilian cities.…”

“…Regardless of whether Uruguay's economic performance is a factor of merit or chance, its overall economic position is important because in less stable economies, partisan contamination of voters' economic evaluations have proved to be much less likely (Evans and Andersen, 2006). As Visconti (2017;p. 3) posits: «Citizens from lower socioeconomic contexts should be more sensitive to changes in their income than citizens from developed countries because these events are likely to have a more meaningful effect on their living conditions». Furthermore, the main antecedent study on the relation between economic perceptions and partisanship in Uruguay concluded that partisanship does not affect Uruguayans economic views (Luna, 2002) while evidence of economic vote in Uruguay has been illustrated in a few studies (Queirolo, 2013;Carlin et al, 2015).…”