Mecro‐Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro‐Perceptions of the Macro‐Economy

Ansolabehere, Stephen; Meredith, Marc; Snowberg, Erik

doi:10.1111/ecpo.12040

Cited by 142 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…3 A common interpretation of this conclusion is that voters are motivated by public interest (Lewin 1991). Others argue that voters are selfinterested, and the apparent importance of sociotropic evaluations occurs because the national economy is a clearer signal of governmental performance than personal economic experiences (Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg 2014;Elinder, Jordahl, and Poutvaara 2015;Kramer 1983;Peltzman 1990). Our findings suggest that it is unlikely voters are primarily motivated by the public interest, and that researchers have been misled by the noisiness of personal economic data.…”

Section: Economic Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pocketbook considerations go from being a distant 12 Including changes in preceding years, as in later sections, has little effect. 13 This specification is based on Table 4 of Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg (2014). The F-statistic on the instruments is usually well above 10 (Angrist and Pischke 2008;Stock, Wright, and Yogo 2012).…”

Section: Sociotropic and Pocketbook Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, the mechanisms by which money flowing through people's pockets and communities maps into votes is much less clear (Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg 2014). Moreover, the economic voting literature is rife with inconsistencies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2017

Self Cite

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the political economy theory underlying it-assumes votes come from the pocketbook, and largely concludes that voters are, on aggregate, forward looking and highly capable of disciplining politicians for economic outcomes (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 1989, 2002.Some of these inconsistencies are due to imperfect data. Almost all of the evidence about the individuallevel effects of economic circumstances comes from survey questions that depend on recollections. Moreover, these recollections are elicited at only a single point in time: right before or right after an election (Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000). This is potentially problematic, as partisan preferences, limited human memory, and other factors might color subjective assessments, making such survey data less than ideal (Wlezien, Franklin, and Twiggs 1997). On the other hand, macro data obscures individuals, leaving inferences subject to ecological biases (Kramer 1983). 1 Using improved data, we seek to paint a full picture of the economic voter and understand the roots of both pocketbook and sociotropic voting. In doing so, we contribute to three long-standing debates in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic views, and whether or not voters are myopic. Our data links a nationally-representative election survey to comprehensive personal financial information. This financial data provides respondents' household income-as verified by tax returns-each year for a complete fouryear term of a government. Merging this data with a detailed national election survey allows us to directly analyze the impact that an individual's financial history has on economic evaluations, vote choice, and political preferences. The results suggest greater commonality 1 Interestingly, Kramer argued that survey-based research, because it is cross-sectional, rather than time-series, is more likely to be subject to ecological fallacies. A more general perspective is that using data about polities to make claims about individuals, or individual data to make claims about polities, is subject to ecological biases. Andrew J. Healy, Mikael Persson, and Erik Snowberg between individual behavior and macro patterns than previously appreciated.In particular, we demonstrate that pocketbook considerations-that is, personal economic circumstances-are, in our data, at least as important as sociotropic ones. Traditional analyses of the survey data we use support the literature's conclusion that sociotropic motivations have the greatest influence on voters. However, when personal financial data is added to the analysis, those same voters are shown to actually vote equally on the basis of their pocketbooks. We then use our data to understand the sources of bias in economic evaluations. Both pocketbook and sociotropic evaluations include partisan bias. However, that bias is twice as large in sociotropic evaluations, perhaps leading to its prominence in predicting vote choice. Finally, counter to prior research, when focusing on pers...

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Section: Economic Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sociotropic and Pocketbook Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2017

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“…3 3 Voter motives could be either sociotropic or self-interested, or prospective or retrospective. As Ansolabehere, Meredith and Snowberg (2014) have shown, parsing out these effects is challenging. This is Both backward-and forward-looking information can help to evaluate the competence of officeholders, but the presence of reliable information is essential (Manin, Przeworski and Stokes 1999).…”

Section: When Does New Economic Information Spur Economic Voting?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

Alt¹,

Marshall²,

Lassen³

2016

The Journal of Politics

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When does new economic information cause voters to re-evaluate the government's competence, and ultimately vote economically? Since politically-relevant information is often conveyed by actors with incentives to influence voter perceptions, the credibility of information sources can vary significantly. This article randomly varies whether voters receive an aggregate unemployment forecast from the central bank, government or main opposition party using a survey experiment in Denmark with access to detailed panel data. We find that politically sophisticated voters discern differences in institutional credibility and the political cost of the signal, and update their unemployment expectations accordingly. Despite failing to differentiate political costs, unsophisticated voters still substantially update their expectations. However, while sophisticated voters intend to engage in substantial prospective economic voting, unsophisticated voters do not link their new unemployment expectations to their vote intention. These findings suggest that economic information supports economic voting most when it is credible and reaches sophisticated voters.

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“…The second dependent variable relies on a survey item exclusively available in the 19th wave of the RLMS that was administered in 2010, and which asks individuals to assess, 'by their opinion, what is the percentage of unemployed people in their region'. This is a measure that has been previously used in influential studies of economic voting as a proxy of households' economic assessments (Ansolabehere et al 2014). We use this item as an indicator of economic evaluations in general, and are not interested in individual deviations from the real unemployment rate in one's regions, or in whether citizens offer an accurate estimate of the unemployment rate.…”

Section: Evidence From Russian Panel Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tertytchnaya

Vries

2018

Polit Behav

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Does self-insurance, such as access to savings or assets, affect support for government? While existing research recognizes that households' ability to privately manage income risk and economic uncertainty influences voter redistributive preferences, we know relatively little about how self-insurance affects evaluations of government in the first place. To gain traction on this question, we combine crosssectional and panel public opinion surveys from 28 countries in Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia with macro-data on economic performance. Exploiting variation in citizen responses to the Great Recession, we show that by enabling citizens to smooth consumption, self-insurance affects how they form economic perceptions. Moreover, we find that self-insurance bolsters support for incumbents. Results allow us to better understand why economic downturns may not dampen support for government, even when economic hardship is rife and access to public safety nets is limited.

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Mecro‐Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro‐Perceptions of the Macro‐Economy

Cited by 142 publications

References 71 publications

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

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

Credible Sources and Sophisticated Voters: When Does New Information Induce Economic Voting?

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

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