Sociotropic Politics: The American Case

Abstract

American elections depend substantially on the vitality of the national economy. Prosperity benefits candidates for the House of Representatives from the incumbent party (defined as the party that controls the presidency at the time of the election), whereas economic downturns enhance the electoral fortunes of opposition candidates. Short-term fluctuations in economic conditions also appear to affect the electorate's presidential choice, as well as the level of public approval conferred upon the president during his term. By this evidence, the political consequences of macroeconomic conditions are both pervasive and powerful. But just how do citizens know whether the incumbent party has succeeded or failed? What kinds of economic evidence do people weigh in their political appraisals? The purpose of our paper is to examine two contrasting depictions of individual citizens – one emphasizing the political significance of citizens' own economic predicaments, the other stressing the political importance of citizens' assessments of the nation's economic predicament – that might underlie the aggregate entwining of economics and politics. Ours is an inquiry into the political economy of individual citizens.

Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey

“…This finding is so ingrained that scholars often forget just how puzzling it is: personal economic experiences are salient and directly experienced, while national economic conditions need to be gleaned from news sources or, possibly, one's surroundings (Grafstein 2009;Kinder and Kiewiet 1981). As Fiorina (1981, 5) notes, pocketbook voting is theoretically more robust, because, "In order to ascertain whether the incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens need only calculate the changes in their own welfare [emphasis added].…”

Government Performance and Life Satisfaction in Contemporary Britain

“…The former relate to evaluations of government performance across the country whereas the latter relate to direct personal experiences of receiving services provided by the state. At the macro level, citizens make sociotropic judgments (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981) about policies relating to the economy and public services. Abundant research shows that national economic conditions influence voting behaviour and party support in the period between elections (e.g., Duch and Stevenson 2008;Lewis-Beck 1988;Whiteley 1986).…”

Voting and the Macroeconomy

“…The contribution to understanding instability of macroeconomic voting-particularly cross-national instability-has been substantial, yet mainly empirical, without reference to an explicit theoretical foundation. The absence of a theoretical referent is odd because a compelling framework, which might have been used to practical advantage in empirical work on instability of economic voting, had emerged during the first part of the 1970Sin the unobserved errors-in-variables and latent variables models of Goldberger (1972aGoldberger ( , 1972b, Griliches (1974), Joreskog (1973), Zellner (1970), and others, and those models had been applied to a wide variety of problems in economics, psychology, and sociology during the following twenty years.31Moreover, the errors-in-variables specification error model was applied directly to the problem of unstable economic voting a full decade before the appearance of Powell and Whitten (1993) in a brilliant paper by Gerald Kramer (1983),which was targeted mainly on the debate launched by Kinder and Kiewiet (1979) concerning the degree to which voting behavior is motivated by personal economic experiences ("egocentric" or "pocketbook" voting),32 rather than by evaluations of government's management of the national economy ("sociotropic" or "macroeconomic" voting). 33 Kramer's argument, which subsumed the responsibility hypothesis, was that voters rationally respond to the "politically relevant" component of macroeconomic performance,where, as in the subsequent empirical work of Powell and Whitten and others, politicalrelevance was defined by the policy capacities of elected authorities.…”