The Global Economy, Competency, and the Economic Vote

Duch, Raymond M.; Stevenson, Randy

doi:10.1017/s0022381609990508

Cited by 140 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Some find voters capable of complex signal extraction (Duch and Stevenson 2010;Ebeid and Rodden 2006;Kayser and Peress 2012), though others find failures (Achen and Bartels 2004b;Bartels 2011;Wolfers 2002). 31 Healy, Malhotra, and Mo (2010), for example, show that outcomes of college football games in the two weeks prior to an election influence Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential incumbent vote share in the counties in which the football teams reside.…”

Section: Experiments 2: Irrelevant Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitations in Controlling Incumbents

2012

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A re citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In three experiments, our participants (1) overweighted recent relative to overall incumbent performance when made aware of an election closer rather than more distant from that event, (2) allowed an unrelated lottery that affected their welfare to influence their choices, and (3) were influenced by rhetoric to give more weight to recent rather than overall incumbent performance. These biases were apparent even though we informed and incentivized respondents to weight all performance equally. Our findings point to key limitations in voters' ability to use a retrospective decision rule.

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Section: Experiments 2: Irrelevant Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitations in Controlling Incumbents

2012

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“…Citizens are less able to assign credit and blame if responsibility is shared between many parties (Anderson, 2000;Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000;Nadeau et al, 2002). The willingness of voters to exercise an economic vote can also have been reduced by the fact that they reasoned that a change in the national economy was due to shocks from the international economy (Duch and Stevenson, 2010;Anderson and Hecht, 2012). Finally, a mix of long-and short-term variables may influence party choice.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The salience of economic considerations for vote choice is assumingly stronger in economically bad times (Singer, 2011) even though the magnitude of the economic vote can be reduced if economic change is caused by exogenous shocks to the economy such as a global recession (Duch and Stevenson, 2010). Studies of economic voting in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 financial crisis show mixed results.…”

Section: Economic Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic voting in Finland before and after an economic crisis

Söderlund¹,

Kestilä‐Kekkonen²

2014

Acta Polit

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This study examines the importance of retrospective economic voting in Finland. More specifically, it investigates if the magnitude of the economic vote was greater after the global financial crisis that unfolded in 2008-2009, as well as if perceptions of the economy had an independent influence on vote choice even when controlling for long-term social cleavages and political predispositions. Using post-election survey data from the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary elections, the first empirical models suggest that the incentives to punish government parties were stronger in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The impact of economic evaluations on vote choice, however, did not remain significant when controlling for long-term anchoring forces related to social background and political predispositions.

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“…, is the proportion of competence the voter observes and interprets and thus can be called the "competency signal" (Duch and Stevenson, 2010). Its interpretation is two-fold:…”

Section: Unifying and Evaluating The Analogues 39mentioning

confidence: 99%