Numerous studies have sought to discover political business cycles in macroeconomic variables. Although voters' subjective economic expectations have been shown to influence their electoral decisions, no existing research has attempted to uncover cyclical patterns in citizens' economic expectations. Using survey data, I seek to determine whether expectations shift to benefit the incumbent president's electoral interest. The analyses show that the percentage of the public predicting an economic upturn increases before a presidential election. One explanation for the findings is that voters might extrapolate cyclical expectations from macroeconomic conditions that contain election-driven cycles. Yet the analyses show that expectational cycles still appear when the macroeconomic conditions are held constant. I conclude by drawing an explanation without recourse to macroeconomic cycles.

In this paper, we estimate vote functions for presidential, House, and Senate elections in the United States using a seemingly unrelated regressions technique adapted to the case of unequal numbers of observations across equations. Our method facilitates rigorous comparisons of voting behavior across election types and provides efficiency gains over ordinary least squares.Our analysis focuses on comparisons across vote functions. We find that: (I) economic variables appear to influence outcomes in all election types, but they are more important in presidential elections than in House or Senate elections; (2) the hypothesis that voters attach equal relative weights to inflation and growth across election types cannot be rejected; (3) incumbency power affects both Senate and House elections but is more important in the House; (4) mid-term effects in House and Senate elections represent a penalty for the party controlling the presidency. h e political science literature does not lack for studies linking aggregate voting outcomes with macroeconomic conditions. In a pioneering study, Kramer (197l) analyzed the effects of economic conditions on aggregate vote shares in congressional and presidential elections in the United States. He found that per capita income growth led to significant gains for the party of the incumbent president. Other studies have followed, with most supporting the hypothesis that elections are influenced by economic events.! Despite the emerging consensus that "economics matters," two recent studies provide a contrasting view for congressional elections. Erikson (1990) finds that an economic growth variable adds no explanatory power to a properly specified model for U.S. House elections, and Alesina and Rosenthal (1989) present similar findings for both the House and the Senate.Our purpose in this paper is to pursue issues posed by the recent contributions of Erikson and Alesina-Rosenthal while introducing a methodological refinement

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Since the 1950s, the dominant pattern of partisan change in the American electorate has involved movements between party identification and independence rather than direct or indirect shifts between parties. This article employs switching regression analyses to investigate the long-term evolution and short-term dynamics of independence between 1953 and 1988. The analyses reveal that a new ‘independence regime’ developed rapidly in the mid-1960s, with the ‘tipping point’ in the transition occurring in the second quarter of 1967. Under the new–but not the old–regime, short-term changes in the size of the independent cohort have reflected economic conditions as well as political events. These findings argue that future research on the dynamics of public support for political parties in the United States and elsewhere will profit by developing dynamic models which assess processes of long- and short-term change in tandem.

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