Retrospective Voting Reconsidered

Abstract

We review advances in the study of retrospective voting, or how citizens evaluate and act on their perceptions of government performance. As a whole, the recent literature provides a more complete and nuanced picture of the retrospective voter as sometimes, but not always, effectively incentivizing elected officials to enhance public welfare. Leveraging examples of retrospective voting in areas other than the economy, the field is heading toward a middle ground in which voters resemble decision makers in many other domains. In many cases, a coherent logic governs voters' choices. In other instances, voters make mistakes, often in predictable ways subject to well-known psychological biases. Understanding the circumstances under which retrospective voting achieves effective democratic accountability and when it fails to do so is an important task for subsequent research. We discuss two additional issues for future exploration: a better understanding of normative benchmarks, and increased attention to the relationship between retrospective voting behavior and policy outcomes.

The Political Consequences of Self-Insurance: Evidence from Central-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia

“…This proposition is in line with studies on economic voting. As existing research shows, in developed and developing economies, voters often rely on their pocketbooks to infer how the government, or the incumbent, are performing (Campello and Zucco 2015;Rosenfeld 2018;Duch and Stevenson 2008;Healy and Malhotra 2012;Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2009;Tilley et al 2018). Finally, the argument is in line with recent scholarship on patrimonial voting, which argues that the possession of high-or lowrisk assets affects support for right and left-wing parties respectively Lewis-Beck and Nadeau 2011;Persson and Martinsson 2016).…”

A Policy‐Oriented Electorate: Evaluations of Candidates and Parties in the Obama Elections Compared to the 1952‐1980 Period

“…There is much debate within the literature as to whether voters focus mostly on the past or on the future (Healy and Malhotra 2013;Holbrook, Clouse, and Weinschenk 2012;Woon 2012 One of the clearest findings to emerge from Miller and Wattenberg's analysis of opinions about the 1952-80 presidential nominees was that the nature of the evaluations generally differed according to a candidate's incumbency status. Respondents were most likely to focus on policy matters when evaluating challengers to incumbent presidents, and incumbents running were evaluated primarily on their performance in office.…”

Credit or debit? The effect of issue ownership on retrospective economic voting

“…A plethora of studies have investigated retrospective voting, focusing primarily on the economy (e.g., Anderson 2000Anderson , 2007Healy and Malhotra 2013;Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). While issue priorities vary substantially between voters and electoral contexts (Singer 2011), economic problems, such as unemployment, are typically among voters' most pressing concerns (Duch and Stevenson 2008).…”

“…Retrospective voting portrays voters as looking to the past and focusing on what has happened on the incumbent's watch, when evaluating their choices at an election (Fiorina 1981;Key 1966;Kramer 1971; for a review, see Healy and Malhotra 2013). The consideration that voters use elections to hold governments accountable lies at the heart of democratic theory.…”