Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Economic Models of Voting

Item

Title

Economic Models of Voting

Author

Anson, Ian G.

Hellwig, Timothy

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Government Systems

Abstract

The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive. A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens' voting behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the wider politico‐economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing the cross‐national, individual‐level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens' subjective economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters.

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Economic Models of Voting
IAN G. ANSON and TIMOTHY HELLWIG

Abstract
The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive.
A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While
there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens’ voting
behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance
of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What
determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the
wider politico-economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars
have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing
the cross-national, individual-level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have
turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic
performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate
core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens’ subjective
economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters.

INTRODUCTION
For decades, models of economic voting have theorized and empirically
verified the existence of a simple and direct relationship: economic conditions influence citizens’ decision making at the ballot box. When citizens
perceive the economy to be performing well, they often reward the incumbent administration with another term in office. Moreover, when things
turn south, they will be even more apt to punish incumbents by voting
for an alternative in the next election (e.g., Fiorina, 1981; Key, 1966). This
straightforward reward-punishment connection notwithstanding, there is a
sense that the observed relationship is a good deal more complicated than
what first meets the eye. Indeed, current scholarship on the economy and
the vote postulates a more nuanced relationship between the economy and
voting behavior. We argue in this chapter that while the field has advanced
through increasing methodological rigor and conceptual sophistication in

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

pursuit of this nuance, future work should return to foundational theoretical
questions on the meaning of economic voting.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Beginning with Kramer’s (1971) pioneering study, early work in the field
honed in on two primary theoretical considerations: first, whether voters
were backward- or forward-looking in applying economic information to
vote considerations, and second, whether citizens viewed the economy in
terms of their own pocketbooks or in terms of national performance indicators. These foundational studies by and large concluded that the economy
influences voter behavior by way of retrospective assessments of the performance of the nation’s economy (e.g., Feldman, 1982; Fiorina, 1981; Kinder &
Kiewiet, 1981). When citizens perceive that the incumbent administration has
overseen a decline in the nation’s economic health during their tenure, they
will be more likely to support the opposition on Election Day (c.f. MacKuen,
Erikson, & Stimson, 1992).
However, rather than clarifying this basic relationship, subsequent research
has muddied the waters. This turn, unfortunate from the perspective of
cumulating knowledge, is attributable to two developments. First, scholars
have sought to understand why economic voting is stronger in some contexts
than others. Earlier studies identified strong evidence for economic voting in
some electoral contexts, such as US Presidential elections, and inconsistent
evidence in others (e.g., Kramer, 1971). This so-called “instability dilemma”
(Paldam, 1991) emerged owing to a step-by-step process of methodological
refinement in the field, coupled with the increasing availability of survey
data from regions such as Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe,
and sub-Saharan Africa. More recent studies in the field have solved this
dilemma by investigating a diverse set of contextual variables thought to
influence the strength of the economic vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008;
Hellwig & Samuels, 2008; Hobolt, Tilley, & Banducci, 2013).
This cross-national literature reinvigorated the study of economic voting.
With time, however, observers such as Anderson (2007) have argued that the
widening array of conditioning factors proposed by these studies has left
us with an insurmountable “contingency dilemma”: the array of variables
now known to influence the strength of economic voting across context has
obfuscated more general patterns. However, even if contextual conditions
could be identified, we argue that specifying the mechanisms through which
fluctuations in national economic conditions bear on citizens’ vote choices is
an even more important—and perhaps more difficult—task.1 One has only
1. Cross-national studies of economic voting in particular have had little to say about the individual
voter’s decision process. Partial exceptions are Gomez and Wilson (2006) and Hellwig (2011).

Economic Models of Voting

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to scan recent entries to the literature to get a wide range of purported pathways between the economy and the vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008, p. 29;
Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming), p. 11; Tilley & Hobolt, 2011, p. 318). Namely,
attempts to understand how citizens’ subjective perceptions of the economy are
formed and brought to bear on vote choice will be important in determining
the direction of the field in the near future. Scholars have recently discovered that subjective economic evaluations are shaped by important latent
and short-term forces (e.g., Duch, Palmer, & Anderson, 2000; Evans & Andersen, 2006). These evaluations are now known to contain biases that derive
from personal characteristics and institutional forces such as partisan identification and media coverage (e.g., Bartels, 2008; Evans & Pickup, 2010; Hetherington, 1996). As Healy and Malhotra (2013, p. 286) observe, voters do
not merely lack knowledge. Rather, they appear to make substantial, consistent, and correlated errors in judgment. Ultimately, the subjective nature
of citizens’ perceptions of the economy—and the extent to which they are
grounded in some objective reality–complicates models of economic voting,
requiring a deeper understanding of just how the economy relates to decisions at the ballot box. The simple reward-punishment model may not be so
simple after all.
BEYOND THE INSTABILITY DILEMMA
INSTABILITY ACROSS ELECTORAL CONTEXT
A major task for scholars of economic voting is determining what causes
variation in the strength of the relationship between economic performance
and voting behavior. In recent years, the field has identified numerous
contextual-level forces that serve to strengthen or diminish this relationship.
Perhaps the most important of such developments concerns the “clarity of
responsibility” afforded to citizens by the institutional arrangement in their
polity. Powell and Whitten (1993) identify a set of institutional factors—such
as coalition government, bicameralism, opposition power sharing, and party
cohesion—that govern the extent incumbents are deemed responsible for
economic outcomes. For example, institutions such as coalition government
in list proportional representation systems can serve to obscure the target of
responsibility for economic performance, yielding a diminished relationship
between the economy and the vote.2 Notions of the “clarity of responsibility”
have now been applied and modified several times over, representing a
major step forward in specifying connection between the economy and
election outcomes (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Bengtsson, 2004; Hellwig &
2. The availability of clearly defined alternatives to the incumbent party—capturing aspects of the
party system such as fragmentation and volatility—is another aspect of clarity of responsibility which
has received consistent empirical support (Anderson, 2000; Paldam, 1991; Lewis-Beck, 1988).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Samuels, 2008; Hobolt et al., 2013; Van der Eijk, Franklin, Demant, & van der
Brug, 2007).
Moving beyond the clarity of responsibility, researchers have turned
to investigate other sources of cross-national variation in the strength of
economic voting. Duch and Stevenson’s (2008) important study strives to
solve the instability dilemma through a rational choice theory of citizens’
evaluations of government competence. The authors reason that citizens
utilize imperfect information to distinguish between fluctuations in the
macroeconomy, which can be attributed to the actions of domestic political
actors, and fluctuations, which are the result of exogenous forces. Only
when voters can identify the degree to which domestic political actors have
influenced economic outcomes can they extract the “competency signal”:
the burden of responsibility for good or bad economic times shouldered by
incumbent politicians. Duch and Stevenson’s economic voter is rationally
retrospective rather than overwhelmed by institutional complexity, as
much of the cross-national research has it. The authors’ microfoundational
approach therefore sharpens our understanding of the economic vote.
Among other pay-offs, this signal-extraction theory helps to explain why
more open economies demonstrate weaker economic voting (Hellwig, 2001):
such economies are more susceptible to exogenous shocks, obscuring the
competency signal for citizens seeking to reward or punish incumbents at
the ballot box.
INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL HETEROGENEITY IN ECONOMIC VOTING
A second line of research confronts instability dilemmas in economic voting
by modeling variation across individuals rather than across macro-contexts.
In light of the established wisdom that citizens, by and large, possess only
rudimentary knowledge of political affairs, how can we expect electorates to
reward politicians to meet performance expectations and punish those who
do not?
There are several answers to this field-defining question. One is that information about the economy is sufficiently prevalent that even the marginally
informed can use it to make reasonable decisions at the ballot box. Fiorina
(1981, p. 5) concisely captures this view in his assertion that “in order to
ascertain whether the incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens
only need to calculate the changes in their own welfare.” A second approach
is to identify variations in individuals’ capacity to cast an economic vote.
Some individuals may consider the economy to be more salient than others
(Singer, 2011a, 2011b). Further, some individuals lack the cognitive capacity to link some types of economic information to distal political actors such
as the President and members of Congress (Gomez & Wilson, 2001). Low

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sophisticates will be unable to link personal economic experiences to political forces, because it is less cognitively demanding to associate such experiences with one’s immediate surroundings. Only the most sophisticated citizens, then, can link their personal economic experiences with their political
behavior.
A third inroad into understanding cross-individual variation in economic
voting is to examine how different aspects of the economy are incorporated
into the voter’s calculus (e.g., Lewis-Beck & Nadeau, 2011; Lewis-Beck,
Nadeau, & Foucault, 2012). This work acknowledges that the economy
is not just incorporated into the vote as a “reward-punishment” valence
consideration pertaining to management competence, but also may be
viewed through a positional lens, in the Downsian3 sense—with some
individuals preferring economic outcomes that, for instance, reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, while others evaluate politicians favorably
for overseeing steady growth and stable prices. Voters may additionally
view the economy in terms of the means of production. This “patrimonial”
dimension states that voters are supportive of politicians whose policies
serve the value of the assets they own.
NEW DIRECTIONS: REEVALUATING THE ECONOMIC
VOTING MECHANISM
Thus far, we have explored some of the myriad ways in which instability in
the economic voting signal occurs both across contexts and across citizens.
While the further investigation of these contextual aspects of economic voting is likely to continue in years to come, we argue that the field should pay
greater attention to a new set of questions—questions that equal or arguably
surpass the instability dilemma in theoretical significance. These concerns
pertain to the causal link between economics and politics, to sources of bias
in economic evaluations, and to the role of elite communications. We observe
that while much of the nascent literature on these subjects is concerned with
the confounding effects of political dispositions (such as partisan identity) on
the economic vote, more should be done to understand the role of subjective
evaluations in the relationship between economic inequality and politics.
ENDOGENEITY AND SUBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS
The first of such challenges is the identification of endogeneity between subjective perceptions of the economy and citizens’ vote choices (Bartels, 2002;
3. Downs’ (1957) rational-choice theory of voting behavior posits that politicians position their platforms on any given policy dimension to appeal to the median voter.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Evans & Andersen, 2006; Evans & Pickup, 2010, Gerber & Huber, 2009). Traditionally, theories of economic voting have embraced the proposition that
citizens form relatively accurate judgments of the objective economy, which
are then used to reward or punish incumbents. Recent studies, however, have
challenged this normatively appealing view by demonstrating that citizens
likely form judgments of the economy which are strongly influenced by their
pre-existing political preferences (cf. Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, & Elias, 2008). At
the beginning of election campaigns, many citizens come to quickly favor
candidates on the basis of convenient heuristics such as partisanship, and
then utilize motivated learning (e.g., Taber & Lodge, 2006) to form biased
judgments of the economy. These judgments reduce cognitive dissonance by
affirming the competency of the preferred candidate, despite the fact that
an unbiased learning process might actually reveal deficiencies in the candidate’s economic competency. Without accounting for this potential endogeneity, we may be strongly overstating the magnitude of economic voting
across a diverse set of electoral contexts.
Assertions of endogeneity put scrutiny to the mechanism underlying
economic voting. If politics shapes economic perceptions rather than the
other way around, then the implication is a disconnect between actual
economic conditions and how the public perceives them. If it is true that
the voter acts as “rational god of vengeance and reward” (Key, 1966, p.
568), then we should expect citizens to link observed economic indicators to
their vote choices. However, as Kramer (1983) first observed, in empirical
models of individual-level vote choice, findings regarding the effects of
subjective economic perceptions on citizens’ vote choice often do not
square with results from investigations of the effect of macrolevel economic
variables such as the unemployment rate and GDP. Conflicting evidence
from micro-subjective and macro-objective level studies of economic voting
represents a major challenge to knowledge accumulation in the field. Do
potential biases in the subjective evaluations of individual citizens confound
the study of economic voting using individual-level data?
We argue that subjective economic evaluations may still be useful indicators of the effects of economic performance on vote choice. However,
some authors have employed statistical strategies for “decontaminating”
these variables and obtaining unbiased estimates (Nadeau, Lewis-Beck, &
Bélanger, 2013). Many scholars argue that instrumental variable estimation
is now required to estimate the causal impact of economic perceptions on
vote choice owing to endogeneity, and in turn have proposed several useful
instruments that may be utilized by future research (Anderson et al., 2004;
Evans & Pickup, 2010; Fraile & Lewis-Beck, 2010; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008).
While Lewis-Beck et al. (2008) utilize panel data to construct a series of
instrumental variables based on respondents’ prior partisanship, Evans and

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Pickup (2010) criticize the construction of these instruments on the basis of
model specification and propose a rival structural equation panel model.
Hansford and Gomez (2013) approach the endogeneity problem from a
slightly different angle, by constructing an instrument from cross-sectional
data. Regardless of the approach used, statistical “fixes” such as instrumental
variables and two-stage modeling have become commonplace.
However, the quest for unbiased and consistent parameter estimates
should not cause analysts to lose sight of economic voting’s foundational
connection to electoral accountability. The construction of structural equation
models should be paired with the construction of theoretically compelling
causal narratives. In contrast to this methodological corrective, we join a
second group of scholars in arguing that subjective economic evaluations
should be reconceptualized, instead of reestimated. As Stevenson and Duch
(2013) suggests, subjective assessments are analytically useful not because
we now possess methods for better estimating their effects, but because such
measures adhere most closely to the theory of economic voting advanced by
the field’s earliest practitioners. Interpreted by some merely as “noise” (e.g.,
Van der Brug, Van der Eijk, & Franklin, 2007), variation in subjective economic evaluations gives us an important insight into citizens’ acquisition of
economic information. Some citizens are more optimistic about the economy
than others, independent of the “objective” state of the economy that has
been agreed upon by experts. According to Stevenson and Duch (2013), this
natural variation is a function of citizens’ exposure to economic information
by way of media consumption, of personal experiences, and of partisan
proclivities. Statistically purging economic evaluations of these important
determinants is akin to stripping these opinions of the psychological and
institutional contexts in which they operate. Subjective evaluations, in this
sense, are analytically useful: they may be contaminated by endogeneity, but
they largely parallel the effects of aggregate indicators in dozens of studies.
Joining the debate from a third perspective, Lewis-Beck et al. (2013) attempt
to overcome discrepancies in the effects of objective macro measures and of
subjective micro assessments by constructing a microlevel model of incumbent support across a series of eight elections in Denmark. By drawing from
precise estimates of economic retrospections reported in additional surveys
of voters, the authors construct an exogenous, aggregate measure of average
economic perceptions for each election. This aggregate “economic perception” variable is a strong predictor of the vote, alongside variables such as
individual-level ideology and aggregate economic statistics.
This debate regarding the “Kramer problem” will likely continue to play
a major role in future scholarship. Understanding subjective evaluations
requires a deeper conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of economic
voting, and no methodological corrective will fully solve the problem. What

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

can cross-sectional patterns in subjective economic perceptions tell us about
economic voting? We should continue to explore such dynamics, within and
across electorates, to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the role of the
economy in citizens’ voting behavior.
STRENGTH VERSUS BIAS IN ECONOMIC EVALUATIONS
To that end, we should move away from investigating the strength of
association between subjective evaluations and vote choice and toward a
consideration of the nature of the evaluations themselves. Where economic
retrospections were previously thought to be acquired passively, by way
of accurate, readily accessible information channels (MacKuen et al., 1992;
Mutz, 1992), some have shown that subjective evaluations can be biased by
these and other forces (e.g., Aidt, 2000; Hetherington, 1996; Hopkins, 2012;
Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan, 2002; Stevenson & Duch, 2013). The result is a
new emphasis on modeling individual economic perceptions. Extant contributions that accord with this idea have revisited an earlier literature (e.g.,
Conover, Feldman, & Knight, 1986) that sought to distinguish which economic indicators play the strongest role in influencing subjective economic
perceptions. For example, Fauvelle-Aymar and Stegmaier (2013) investigate
the association between US stock market growth and Presidential approval,
finding that the trends are more closely linked than previously thought.
Such findings point to the notion that subjective economic perceptions
are not made up of a balanced amalgam of current economic conditions
as measured by professional economists, but rather critically depend on
the content of intermediary information being passed to citizens through
the news.
Another form of bias in economic voting—and one carrying considerable
normative implications—has been identified by Bartels (2008, cf. Hopkins,
2012). Even if they have found themselves relatively worse off in the period
before an election, low-income Americans consistently prefer presidential
candidates who have overseen economic success not in general terms
but targeted specifically to the very wealthy. While American voters are
indeed employing retrospective performance evaluations, this research
implies that they do so on the basis of the wrong economic indicators.
As for what explains this “class bias,” Bartels (2008) provides a relatively
ambiguous response. As seen above, recent efforts to better understand
the determinants of subjective economic evaluations are well-positioned to
examine why Americans are voting on the basis of class-biased economic
information. If Americans’ subjective economic retrospections are tinted by
class-based lenses, what factors are responsible for shifts in middle-class
citizen’s evaluations away from their own objective well-being?

Economic Models of Voting

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FRAMING THE ECONOMY: SIGNALS FROM TRUSTED ELITES
A related area ripe for further exploration pertains to how elites communicate news about the economy. Until recently, scholars have largely ignored
this issue. Important exceptions include Mutz (1992), who argues that mass
media increase their role as an intermediary among the national politics,
economics, and the perceptions of the average American, and Hetherington (1996), who shows how negative reporting of the economy by the media
shaped public perceptions and may have contributed to incumbent president
George Bush’s defeat in the 1992 election. Media effects have received more
sustained attention in recent years, however, as scholars have sought inroads
into understanding perceptual biases (e.g., Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming);
Soroka, 2006).
In addition to the media, politicians themselves can shape the economic
vote. Politicians can strategically (de)emphasize economic issues by choosing
to devote greater or lesser emphasis to it in election campaigns (Grafstrom
& Salmond, (n.d.)) or by shifting their position-taking behavior with respect
to economic policies (Hellwig, 2012). Systemic corruption may also interfere
with economic accountability—and in turn, positive swings in economic performance can allow corrupt officials a “free pass” on election day (Tavits,
2007; Zechmeister & Zizumbo-Colunga, 2013).
CONCLUSION: A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP
While the relationship between economic performance and vote choice
has been empirically verified in many electoral contexts across decades of
research, the mechanism that links these two concepts together is still not
fully understood. Scholars have been successful in expanding the scope
of inquiry in the field by investigating economic voting in new regions of
the world and at diverse levels of government, and this endeavor should
continue to spark creative new research propositions in the future. Perhaps
the most fruitful avenue for future inquiry in the field, however, concerns
the very definition of economic voting. Does it require an assessment of
objective economic conditions? If so, do all voters experience the same objective reality? If not, what do we make of the relationship between subjective
economic retrospections and citizens’ vote choices, given that the causal
arrow likely flows in both directions? Is bias in economic voting something
to be corrected from a statistical standpoint, or is this patterned variation
meaningful in its own right? While we should continue to investigate how
the strength of economic voting is conditioned by electoral context and
individual characteristics, we should also be asking what this relationship
means from a theoretical and, ultimately, normative perspective. For, at

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the end of the day, the resilient attraction of the economic vote lies in its
connection to electoral accountability.
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Lewis-Beck, M. S., Nadeau, R., & Foucault, M. (2012). The compleat economic voter:
New theory and British evidence. British Journal of Political Science, 43, 241–61.
Lewis-Beck, M. S., Stubager, R., & Nadeau, R. (2013). The Kramer problem:
Micro–macro resolution with a Danish pool. Electoral Studies, 32(2), 305–320.
MacKuen, M. B., Erikson, R. S., & Stimson, J. A. (1992). Peasants or bankers? The
American electorate and the US economy. American Political Science Review, 86(3),
597–611.
Mutz, D. C. (1992). Mass media and the depoliticization of personal experience.
American Journal of Political Science, 36(2), 483–508.
Nadeau, R., Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Bélanger, É. (2013). Economics and elections revisited. Comparative Political Studies, 46(5), 551–573.
Paldam, M. (1991). How robust is the vote function? A study of seventeen nations
over four decades. In H. Norpoth, M. S. Lewis-Beck & J.-D. Lafay (Eds.), Economics
and politics: The calculus of support. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Powell, G. B., Jr., & Whitten, G. D. (1993). A cross-national analysis of economic voting: Taking account of the political context. American Journal of Political Science,
37(2), 391–414.
Shah, D. V., Watts, M. D., Domke, D., & Fan, D. P. (2002). News framing and cueing
of issue regimes: Explaining Clinton’s public approval in spite of scandal. Public
Opinion Quarterly, 66(3), 339–370.
Singer, M. M. (2011a). When do voters actually think “It’s the Economy”? Evidence
from the 2008 presidential campaign. Electoral Studies, 30(4), 621–632.
Singer, M. M. (2011b). Who says “It’s the economy”? Cross-national and crossindividual variation in the salience of economic performance. Comparative Political
Studies, 44(3), 284–312.
Soroka, S. N. (2006). Good news and bad news: Asymmetric responses to economic
information. Journal of Politics, 68(2), 372–385.
Stevenson, R. T., & Duch, R. (2013). The meaning and use of subjective perceptions
in studies of economic voting. Electoral Studies, 32(2), 305–320.
Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political
beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755–769.
Tavits, M. (2007). Clarity of responsibility and corruption. American Journal of Political
Science, 51(1), 218–229.
Tilley, J., & Hobolt, S. B. (2011). Is the government to blame? An experimental test
of how partisanship shapes perceptions of performance and responsibility. The
Journal of Politics, 73(2), 316–330.
Van der Brug, W., Van der Eijk, C., & Franklin, M. (2007). The economy and the vote: Economic conditions and elections in fifteen countries. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Van der Eijk, C., Franklin, M., Demant, F., & van der Brug, W. (2007). The endogenous economy: ‘Real’ economic conditions, subjective economic evaluations and
government support. Acta Politica, 42(1), 1–22.

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Zechmeister, E. J., & Zizumbo-Colunga, D. (2013). The varying political toll of concerns about corruption in good versus bad economic times. Comparative Political
Studies, 46(10), 1190–1218.

IAN G. ANSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian G. Anson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at
Indiana University Bloomington. He is broadly interested in political communication, voting behavior, the politics of inequality, quantitative methodology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. His dissertation seeks to
understand how biases in Americans’ economic perceptions are shaped by
developments in contemporary American media institutions. Ian completed
a BA in political science and contemporary European studies at UNC-Chapel
Hill, and holds an MS in applied statistics from Indiana University.
TIMOTHY HELLWIG SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Timothy Hellwig is an Associate Professor of political science and Director
of the Institute for European Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His
research and teaching interests are in comparative political economy, political behavior, European politics, and research methods. His work on these
areas has appeared in several journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. His
book manuscript, Globalization and Mass Politics: Retaining the Room to Maneuver, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He holds a BA from St.
Cloud State University, an MA from American University, and a PhD from
the University of Minnesota. He has also been a researcher at the International Foundation for Election Systems, on the faculty at the University of
Houston, and a visiting researcher at the University of Essex and at Gothenburg University.
RELATED ESSAYS
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The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science),
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Nicholas J. D’Amico
Elites (Sociology), Johan S. G. Chu and Mark S. Mizruchi
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Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Presidential Power (Political Science), William G. Howell
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From Individual Rationality to Socially Embedded Self-Regulation (Sociology), Siegwart Lindenberg
Against Game Theory (Political Science), Gale M. Lucas et al.
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Michaela Mattes
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Petersen and Lene Aarøe
Leadership (Anthropology), Adrienne Tecza and Dominic Johnson



Economic Models of Voting
IAN G. ANSON and TIMOTHY HELLWIG

Abstract
The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive.
A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While
there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens’ voting
behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance
of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What
determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the
wider politico-economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars
have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing
the cross-national, individual-level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have
turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic
performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate
core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens’ subjective
economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters.

INTRODUCTION
For decades, models of economic voting have theorized and empirically
verified the existence of a simple and direct relationship: economic conditions influence citizens’ decision making at the ballot box. When citizens
perceive the economy to be performing well, they often reward the incumbent administration with another term in office. Moreover, when things
turn south, they will be even more apt to punish incumbents by voting
for an alternative in the next election (e.g., Fiorina, 1981; Key, 1966). This
straightforward reward-punishment connection notwithstanding, there is a
sense that the observed relationship is a good deal more complicated than
what first meets the eye. Indeed, current scholarship on the economy and
the vote postulates a more nuanced relationship between the economy and
voting behavior. We argue in this chapter that while the field has advanced
through increasing methodological rigor and conceptual sophistication in

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

pursuit of this nuance, future work should return to foundational theoretical
questions on the meaning of economic voting.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Beginning with Kramer’s (1971) pioneering study, early work in the field
honed in on two primary theoretical considerations: first, whether voters
were backward- or forward-looking in applying economic information to
vote considerations, and second, whether citizens viewed the economy in
terms of their own pocketbooks or in terms of national performance indicators. These foundational studies by and large concluded that the economy
influences voter behavior by way of retrospective assessments of the performance of the nation’s economy (e.g., Feldman, 1982; Fiorina, 1981; Kinder &
Kiewiet, 1981). When citizens perceive that the incumbent administration has
overseen a decline in the nation’s economic health during their tenure, they
will be more likely to support the opposition on Election Day (c.f. MacKuen,
Erikson, & Stimson, 1992).
However, rather than clarifying this basic relationship, subsequent research
has muddied the waters. This turn, unfortunate from the perspective of
cumulating knowledge, is attributable to two developments. First, scholars
have sought to understand why economic voting is stronger in some contexts
than others. Earlier studies identified strong evidence for economic voting in
some electoral contexts, such as US Presidential elections, and inconsistent
evidence in others (e.g., Kramer, 1971). This so-called “instability dilemma”
(Paldam, 1991) emerged owing to a step-by-step process of methodological
refinement in the field, coupled with the increasing availability of survey
data from regions such as Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe,
and sub-Saharan Africa. More recent studies in the field have solved this
dilemma by investigating a diverse set of contextual variables thought to
influence the strength of the economic vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008;
Hellwig & Samuels, 2008; Hobolt, Tilley, & Banducci, 2013).
This cross-national literature reinvigorated the study of economic voting.
With time, however, observers such as Anderson (2007) have argued that the
widening array of conditioning factors proposed by these studies has left
us with an insurmountable “contingency dilemma”: the array of variables
now known to influence the strength of economic voting across context has
obfuscated more general patterns. However, even if contextual conditions
could be identified, we argue that specifying the mechanisms through which
fluctuations in national economic conditions bear on citizens’ vote choices is
an even more important—and perhaps more difficult—task.1 One has only
1. Cross-national studies of economic voting in particular have had little to say about the individual
voter’s decision process. Partial exceptions are Gomez and Wilson (2006) and Hellwig (2011).

Economic Models of Voting

3

to scan recent entries to the literature to get a wide range of purported pathways between the economy and the vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008, p. 29;
Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming), p. 11; Tilley & Hobolt, 2011, p. 318). Namely,
attempts to understand how citizens’ subjective perceptions of the economy are
formed and brought to bear on vote choice will be important in determining
the direction of the field in the near future. Scholars have recently discovered that subjective economic evaluations are shaped by important latent
and short-term forces (e.g., Duch, Palmer, & Anderson, 2000; Evans & Andersen, 2006). These evaluations are now known to contain biases that derive
from personal characteristics and institutional forces such as partisan identification and media coverage (e.g., Bartels, 2008; Evans & Pickup, 2010; Hetherington, 1996). As Healy and Malhotra (2013, p. 286) observe, voters do
not merely lack knowledge. Rather, they appear to make substantial, consistent, and correlated errors in judgment. Ultimately, the subjective nature
of citizens’ perceptions of the economy—and the extent to which they are
grounded in some objective reality–complicates models of economic voting,
requiring a deeper understanding of just how the economy relates to decisions at the ballot box. The simple reward-punishment model may not be so
simple after all.
BEYOND THE INSTABILITY DILEMMA
INSTABILITY ACROSS ELECTORAL CONTEXT
A major task for scholars of economic voting is determining what causes
variation in the strength of the relationship between economic performance
and voting behavior. In recent years, the field has identified numerous
contextual-level forces that serve to strengthen or diminish this relationship.
Perhaps the most important of such developments concerns the “clarity of
responsibility” afforded to citizens by the institutional arrangement in their
polity. Powell and Whitten (1993) identify a set of institutional factors—such
as coalition government, bicameralism, opposition power sharing, and party
cohesion—that govern the extent incumbents are deemed responsible for
economic outcomes. For example, institutions such as coalition government
in list proportional representation systems can serve to obscure the target of
responsibility for economic performance, yielding a diminished relationship
between the economy and the vote.2 Notions of the “clarity of responsibility”
have now been applied and modified several times over, representing a
major step forward in specifying connection between the economy and
election outcomes (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Bengtsson, 2004; Hellwig &
2. The availability of clearly defined alternatives to the incumbent party—capturing aspects of the
party system such as fragmentation and volatility—is another aspect of clarity of responsibility which
has received consistent empirical support (Anderson, 2000; Paldam, 1991; Lewis-Beck, 1988).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Samuels, 2008; Hobolt et al., 2013; Van der Eijk, Franklin, Demant, & van der
Brug, 2007).
Moving beyond the clarity of responsibility, researchers have turned
to investigate other sources of cross-national variation in the strength of
economic voting. Duch and Stevenson’s (2008) important study strives to
solve the instability dilemma through a rational choice theory of citizens’
evaluations of government competence. The authors reason that citizens
utilize imperfect information to distinguish between fluctuations in the
macroeconomy, which can be attributed to the actions of domestic political
actors, and fluctuations, which are the result of exogenous forces. Only
when voters can identify the degree to which domestic political actors have
influenced economic outcomes can they extract the “competency signal”:
the burden of responsibility for good or bad economic times shouldered by
incumbent politicians. Duch and Stevenson’s economic voter is rationally
retrospective rather than overwhelmed by institutional complexity, as
much of the cross-national research has it. The authors’ microfoundational
approach therefore sharpens our understanding of the economic vote.
Among other pay-offs, this signal-extraction theory helps to explain why
more open economies demonstrate weaker economic voting (Hellwig, 2001):
such economies are more susceptible to exogenous shocks, obscuring the
competency signal for citizens seeking to reward or punish incumbents at
the ballot box.
INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL HETEROGENEITY IN ECONOMIC VOTING
A second line of research confronts instability dilemmas in economic voting
by modeling variation across individuals rather than across macro-contexts.
In light of the established wisdom that citizens, by and large, possess only
rudimentary knowledge of political affairs, how can we expect electorates to
reward politicians to meet performance expectations and punish those who
do not?
There are several answers to this field-defining question. One is that information about the economy is sufficiently prevalent that even the marginally
informed can use it to make reasonable decisions at the ballot box. Fiorina
(1981, p. 5) concisely captures this view in his assertion that “in order to
ascertain whether the incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens
only need to calculate the changes in their own welfare.” A second approach
is to identify variations in individuals’ capacity to cast an economic vote.
Some individuals may consider the economy to be more salient than others
(Singer, 2011a, 2011b). Further, some individuals lack the cognitive capacity to link some types of economic information to distal political actors such
as the President and members of Congress (Gomez & Wilson, 2001). Low

Economic Models of Voting

5

sophisticates will be unable to link personal economic experiences to political forces, because it is less cognitively demanding to associate such experiences with one’s immediate surroundings. Only the most sophisticated citizens, then, can link their personal economic experiences with their political
behavior.
A third inroad into understanding cross-individual variation in economic
voting is to examine how different aspects of the economy are incorporated
into the voter’s calculus (e.g., Lewis-Beck & Nadeau, 2011; Lewis-Beck,
Nadeau, & Foucault, 2012). This work acknowledges that the economy
is not just incorporated into the vote as a “reward-punishment” valence
consideration pertaining to management competence, but also may be
viewed through a positional lens, in the Downsian3 sense—with some
individuals preferring economic outcomes that, for instance, reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, while others evaluate politicians favorably
for overseeing steady growth and stable prices. Voters may additionally
view the economy in terms of the means of production. This “patrimonial”
dimension states that voters are supportive of politicians whose policies
serve the value of the assets they own.
NEW DIRECTIONS: REEVALUATING THE ECONOMIC
VOTING MECHANISM
Thus far, we have explored some of the myriad ways in which instability in
the economic voting signal occurs both across contexts and across citizens.
While the further investigation of these contextual aspects of economic voting is likely to continue in years to come, we argue that the field should pay
greater attention to a new set of questions—questions that equal or arguably
surpass the instability dilemma in theoretical significance. These concerns
pertain to the causal link between economics and politics, to sources of bias
in economic evaluations, and to the role of elite communications. We observe
that while much of the nascent literature on these subjects is concerned with
the confounding effects of political dispositions (such as partisan identity) on
the economic vote, more should be done to understand the role of subjective
evaluations in the relationship between economic inequality and politics.
ENDOGENEITY AND SUBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS
The first of such challenges is the identification of endogeneity between subjective perceptions of the economy and citizens’ vote choices (Bartels, 2002;
3. Downs’ (1957) rational-choice theory of voting behavior posits that politicians position their platforms on any given policy dimension to appeal to the median voter.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Evans & Andersen, 2006; Evans & Pickup, 2010, Gerber & Huber, 2009). Traditionally, theories of economic voting have embraced the proposition that
citizens form relatively accurate judgments of the objective economy, which
are then used to reward or punish incumbents. Recent studies, however, have
challenged this normatively appealing view by demonstrating that citizens
likely form judgments of the economy which are strongly influenced by their
pre-existing political preferences (cf. Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, & Elias, 2008). At
the beginning of election campaigns, many citizens come to quickly favor
candidates on the basis of convenient heuristics such as partisanship, and
then utilize motivated learning (e.g., Taber & Lodge, 2006) to form biased
judgments of the economy. These judgments reduce cognitive dissonance by
affirming the competency of the preferred candidate, despite the fact that
an unbiased learning process might actually reveal deficiencies in the candidate’s economic competency. Without accounting for this potential endogeneity, we may be strongly overstating the magnitude of economic voting
across a diverse set of electoral contexts.
Assertions of endogeneity put scrutiny to the mechanism underlying
economic voting. If politics shapes economic perceptions rather than the
other way around, then the implication is a disconnect between actual
economic conditions and how the public perceives them. If it is true that
the voter acts as “rational god of vengeance and reward” (Key, 1966, p.
568), then we should expect citizens to link observed economic indicators to
their vote choices. However, as Kramer (1983) first observed, in empirical
models of individual-level vote choice, findings regarding the effects of
subjective economic perceptions on citizens’ vote choice often do not
square with results from investigations of the effect of macrolevel economic
variables such as the unemployment rate and GDP. Conflicting evidence
from micro-subjective and macro-objective level studies of economic voting
represents a major challenge to knowledge accumulation in the field. Do
potential biases in the subjective evaluations of individual citizens confound
the study of economic voting using individual-level data?
We argue that subjective economic evaluations may still be useful indicators of the effects of economic performance on vote choice. However,
some authors have employed statistical strategies for “decontaminating”
these variables and obtaining unbiased estimates (Nadeau, Lewis-Beck, &
Bélanger, 2013). Many scholars argue that instrumental variable estimation
is now required to estimate the causal impact of economic perceptions on
vote choice owing to endogeneity, and in turn have proposed several useful
instruments that may be utilized by future research (Anderson et al., 2004;
Evans & Pickup, 2010; Fraile & Lewis-Beck, 2010; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008).
While Lewis-Beck et al. (2008) utilize panel data to construct a series of
instrumental variables based on respondents’ prior partisanship, Evans and

Economic Models of Voting

7

Pickup (2010) criticize the construction of these instruments on the basis of
model specification and propose a rival structural equation panel model.
Hansford and Gomez (2013) approach the endogeneity problem from a
slightly different angle, by constructing an instrument from cross-sectional
data. Regardless of the approach used, statistical “fixes” such as instrumental
variables and two-stage modeling have become commonplace.
However, the quest for unbiased and consistent parameter estimates
should not cause analysts to lose sight of economic voting’s foundational
connection to electoral accountability. The construction of structural equation
models should be paired with the construction of theoretically compelling
causal narratives. In contrast to this methodological corrective, we join a
second group of scholars in arguing that subjective economic evaluations
should be reconceptualized, instead of reestimated. As Stevenson and Duch
(2013) suggests, subjective assessments are analytically useful not because
we now possess methods for better estimating their effects, but because such
measures adhere most closely to the theory of economic voting advanced by
the field’s earliest practitioners. Interpreted by some merely as “noise” (e.g.,
Van der Brug, Van der Eijk, & Franklin, 2007), variation in subjective economic evaluations gives us an important insight into citizens’ acquisition of
economic information. Some citizens are more optimistic about the economy
than others, independent of the “objective” state of the economy that has
been agreed upon by experts. According to Stevenson and Duch (2013), this
natural variation is a function of citizens’ exposure to economic information
by way of media consumption, of personal experiences, and of partisan
proclivities. Statistically purging economic evaluations of these important
determinants is akin to stripping these opinions of the psychological and
institutional contexts in which they operate. Subjective evaluations, in this
sense, are analytically useful: they may be contaminated by endogeneity, but
they largely parallel the effects of aggregate indicators in dozens of studies.
Joining the debate from a third perspective, Lewis-Beck et al. (2013) attempt
to overcome discrepancies in the effects of objective macro measures and of
subjective micro assessments by constructing a microlevel model of incumbent support across a series of eight elections in Denmark. By drawing from
precise estimates of economic retrospections reported in additional surveys
of voters, the authors construct an exogenous, aggregate measure of average
economic perceptions for each election. This aggregate “economic perception” variable is a strong predictor of the vote, alongside variables such as
individual-level ideology and aggregate economic statistics.
This debate regarding the “Kramer problem” will likely continue to play
a major role in future scholarship. Understanding subjective evaluations
requires a deeper conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of economic
voting, and no methodological corrective will fully solve the problem. What

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

can cross-sectional patterns in subjective economic perceptions tell us about
economic voting? We should continue to explore such dynamics, within and
across electorates, to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the role of the
economy in citizens’ voting behavior.
STRENGTH VERSUS BIAS IN ECONOMIC EVALUATIONS
To that end, we should move away from investigating the strength of
association between subjective evaluations and vote choice and toward a
consideration of the nature of the evaluations themselves. Where economic
retrospections were previously thought to be acquired passively, by way
of accurate, readily accessible information channels (MacKuen et al., 1992;
Mutz, 1992), some have shown that subjective evaluations can be biased by
these and other forces (e.g., Aidt, 2000; Hetherington, 1996; Hopkins, 2012;
Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan, 2002; Stevenson & Duch, 2013). The result is a
new emphasis on modeling individual economic perceptions. Extant contributions that accord with this idea have revisited an earlier literature (e.g.,
Conover, Feldman, & Knight, 1986) that sought to distinguish which economic indicators play the strongest role in influencing subjective economic
perceptions. For example, Fauvelle-Aymar and Stegmaier (2013) investigate
the association between US stock market growth and Presidential approval,
finding that the trends are more closely linked than previously thought.
Such findings point to the notion that subjective economic perceptions
are not made up of a balanced amalgam of current economic conditions
as measured by professional economists, but rather critically depend on
the content of intermediary information being passed to citizens through
the news.
Another form of bias in economic voting—and one carrying considerable
normative implications—has been identified by Bartels (2008, cf. Hopkins,
2012). Even if they have found themselves relatively worse off in the period
before an election, low-income Americans consistently prefer presidential
candidates who have overseen economic success not in general terms
but targeted specifically to the very wealthy. While American voters are
indeed employing retrospective performance evaluations, this research
implies that they do so on the basis of the wrong economic indicators.
As for what explains this “class bias,” Bartels (2008) provides a relatively
ambiguous response. As seen above, recent efforts to better understand
the determinants of subjective economic evaluations are well-positioned to
examine why Americans are voting on the basis of class-biased economic
information. If Americans’ subjective economic retrospections are tinted by
class-based lenses, what factors are responsible for shifts in middle-class
citizen’s evaluations away from their own objective well-being?

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FRAMING THE ECONOMY: SIGNALS FROM TRUSTED ELITES
A related area ripe for further exploration pertains to how elites communicate news about the economy. Until recently, scholars have largely ignored
this issue. Important exceptions include Mutz (1992), who argues that mass
media increase their role as an intermediary among the national politics,
economics, and the perceptions of the average American, and Hetherington (1996), who shows how negative reporting of the economy by the media
shaped public perceptions and may have contributed to incumbent president
George Bush’s defeat in the 1992 election. Media effects have received more
sustained attention in recent years, however, as scholars have sought inroads
into understanding perceptual biases (e.g., Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming);
Soroka, 2006).
In addition to the media, politicians themselves can shape the economic
vote. Politicians can strategically (de)emphasize economic issues by choosing
to devote greater or lesser emphasis to it in election campaigns (Grafstrom
& Salmond, (n.d.)) or by shifting their position-taking behavior with respect
to economic policies (Hellwig, 2012). Systemic corruption may also interfere
with economic accountability—and in turn, positive swings in economic performance can allow corrupt officials a “free pass” on election day (Tavits,
2007; Zechmeister & Zizumbo-Colunga, 2013).
CONCLUSION: A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP
While the relationship between economic performance and vote choice
has been empirically verified in many electoral contexts across decades of
research, the mechanism that links these two concepts together is still not
fully understood. Scholars have been successful in expanding the scope
of inquiry in the field by investigating economic voting in new regions of
the world and at diverse levels of government, and this endeavor should
continue to spark creative new research propositions in the future. Perhaps
the most fruitful avenue for future inquiry in the field, however, concerns
the very definition of economic voting. Does it require an assessment of
objective economic conditions? If so, do all voters experience the same objective reality? If not, what do we make of the relationship between subjective
economic retrospections and citizens’ vote choices, given that the causal
arrow likely flows in both directions? Is bias in economic voting something
to be corrected from a statistical standpoint, or is this patterned variation
meaningful in its own right? While we should continue to investigate how
the strength of economic voting is conditioned by electoral context and
individual characteristics, we should also be asking what this relationship
means from a theoretical and, ultimately, normative perspective. For, at

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the end of the day, the resilient attraction of the economic vote lies in its
connection to electoral accountability.
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Political Science Review, 103(3), 407–426.

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Gomez, B. T., & Wilson, J. M. (2001). Political sophistication and economic voting in
the American electorate: A theory of heterogeneous attribution. American Journal
of Political Science, 45(4), 899–914.
Gomez, B. T., & Wilson, J. M. (2006). Cognitive heterogeneity and economic voting:
A comparative analysis of four democratic electorates. American Journal of Political
Science, 50(1), 127–145.
Grafstrom, C., & Salmond, R. (n.d.) Moments of clarity: Election campaigns, clarity of
responsibility, and economic voting. Working paper.
Hansford, T. G., and B. T. Gomez. (2013). Reevaluating the sociotropic economic voting
hypothesis. Working Paper.
Healy, A., & Malhotra, N. (2013). Retrospective voting reconsidered. Annual Review
of Political Science, 16, 285–306.
Hellwig, T. (2001). Interdependence, government constraints, and economic voting.
The Journal of Politics, 63(4), 1141–62.
Hellwig, T. (2011). Context, information, and performance voting. In R. J. Dalton & C.
J. Anderson (Eds.), Citizens, context, and choice: How context shapes citizens’ electoral
choices (pp. 149–175). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Hellwig, T. (2012). Constructing accountability: Party position-taking and economic
voting. Comparative Political Studies, 45(1), 92–119.
Hellwig, T., & Samuels, D. (2008). Electoral accountability and the variety of democratic regimes. British Journal of Political Science, 38(1), 65.
Hetherington, M. J. (1996). The media’s role in forming voters’ national economic
evaluations in 1992. American Journal of Political Science, 40(2), 372–395.
Hobolt, S. B., Tilley, J., & Banducci, S. (2013). Clarity of responsibility: How government cohesion conditions performance voting. European Journal of Political
Research, 52(2), 164–187.
Hopkins, D. J. (2012). Whose economy? Perceptions of national economic performance during unequal growth. Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(1), 50–71.
Kayser, M. A., & Peress, M. (forthcoming). The buck stops over there? Benchmarking elections in the open economy. In J. Vowles & G. Xezionakos (Eds.), Downgraded democracy? Globalization and mass politics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press CSES Series.
Key, V. O. (1966). The responsible electorate: Rationality in presidential voting, 1936–1960.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kinder, D. R., & Kiewiet, D. R. (1981). Sociotropic politics: The American case. British
Journal of Political Science, 11(2), 129–161.
Kramer, G. H. (1971). Short-term fluctuations in US voting behavior, 1896–1964.
American Political Science Review, 65(01), 131–143.
Kramer, G. H. (1983). The ecological fallacy revisited: Aggregate-versus individuallevel findings on economics and elections, and sociotropic voting. The American
Political Science Review, 77(1), 92–111.
Lewis-Beck, M. S. (1988). Economics and elections: The major western democracies. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Nadeau, R. (2011). Economic voting theory: Neglected dimensions. Electoral Studies, 30, 288–94.

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Lewis-Beck, M. S., Nadeau, R., & Elias, A. (2008). Economics, party, and the vote:
Causality issues and panel data. American Journal of Political Science, 52(1), 84–95.
Lewis-Beck, M. S., Nadeau, R., & Foucault, M. (2012). The compleat economic voter:
New theory and British evidence. British Journal of Political Science, 43, 241–61.
Lewis-Beck, M. S., Stubager, R., & Nadeau, R. (2013). The Kramer problem:
Micro–macro resolution with a Danish pool. Electoral Studies, 32(2), 305–320.
MacKuen, M. B., Erikson, R. S., & Stimson, J. A. (1992). Peasants or bankers? The
American electorate and the US economy. American Political Science Review, 86(3),
597–611.
Mutz, D. C. (1992). Mass media and the depoliticization of personal experience.
American Journal of Political Science, 36(2), 483–508.
Nadeau, R., Lewis-Beck, M. S., & Bélanger, É. (2013). Economics and elections revisited. Comparative Political Studies, 46(5), 551–573.
Paldam, M. (1991). How robust is the vote function? A study of seventeen nations
over four decades. In H. Norpoth, M. S. Lewis-Beck & J.-D. Lafay (Eds.), Economics
and politics: The calculus of support. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Powell, G. B., Jr., & Whitten, G. D. (1993). A cross-national analysis of economic voting: Taking account of the political context. American Journal of Political Science,
37(2), 391–414.
Shah, D. V., Watts, M. D., Domke, D., & Fan, D. P. (2002). News framing and cueing
of issue regimes: Explaining Clinton’s public approval in spite of scandal. Public
Opinion Quarterly, 66(3), 339–370.
Singer, M. M. (2011a). When do voters actually think “It’s the Economy”? Evidence
from the 2008 presidential campaign. Electoral Studies, 30(4), 621–632.
Singer, M. M. (2011b). Who says “It’s the economy”? Cross-national and crossindividual variation in the salience of economic performance. Comparative Political
Studies, 44(3), 284–312.
Soroka, S. N. (2006). Good news and bad news: Asymmetric responses to economic
information. Journal of Politics, 68(2), 372–385.
Stevenson, R. T., & Duch, R. (2013). The meaning and use of subjective perceptions
in studies of economic voting. Electoral Studies, 32(2), 305–320.
Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political
beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755–769.
Tavits, M. (2007). Clarity of responsibility and corruption. American Journal of Political
Science, 51(1), 218–229.
Tilley, J., & Hobolt, S. B. (2011). Is the government to blame? An experimental test
of how partisanship shapes perceptions of performance and responsibility. The
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Van der Brug, W., Van der Eijk, C., & Franklin, M. (2007). The economy and the vote: Economic conditions and elections in fifteen countries. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
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Van der Eijk, C., Franklin, M., Demant, F., & van der Brug, W. (2007). The endogenous economy: ‘Real’ economic conditions, subjective economic evaluations and
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Zechmeister, E. J., & Zizumbo-Colunga, D. (2013). The varying political toll of concerns about corruption in good versus bad economic times. Comparative Political
Studies, 46(10), 1190–1218.

IAN G. ANSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian G. Anson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at
Indiana University Bloomington. He is broadly interested in political communication, voting behavior, the politics of inequality, quantitative methodology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. His dissertation seeks to
understand how biases in Americans’ economic perceptions are shaped by
developments in contemporary American media institutions. Ian completed
a BA in political science and contemporary European studies at UNC-Chapel
Hill, and holds an MS in applied statistics from Indiana University.
TIMOTHY HELLWIG SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Timothy Hellwig is an Associate Professor of political science and Director
of the Institute for European Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His
research and teaching interests are in comparative political economy, political behavior, European politics, and research methods. His work on these
areas has appeared in several journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. His
book manuscript, Globalization and Mass Politics: Retaining the Room to Maneuver, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He holds a BA from St.
Cloud State University, an MA from American University, and a PhD from
the University of Minnesota. He has also been a researcher at the International Foundation for Election Systems, on the faculty at the University of
Houston, and a visiting researcher at the University of Essex and at Gothenburg University.
RELATED ESSAYS
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Nicholas J. D’Amico
Elites (Sociology), Johan S. G. Chu and Mark S. Mizruchi
Government Formation and Cabinets (Political Science), Sona N. Golder
Behavioral Economics (Sociology), Guy Hochman and Dan Ariely

14

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Presidential Power (Political Science), William G. Howell
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Economic Models of Voting
IAN G. ANSON and TIMOTHY HELLWIG

Abstract
The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive.
A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While
there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens’ voting
behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance
of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What
determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the
wider politico-economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars
have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing
the cross-national, individual-level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have
turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic
performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate
core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens’ subjective
economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters.

INTRODUCTION
For decades, models of economic voting have theorized and empirically
verified the existence of a simple and direct relationship: economic conditions influence citizens’ decision making at the ballot box. When citizens
perceive the economy to be performing well, they often reward the incumbent administration with another term in office. Moreover, when things
turn south, they will be even more apt to punish incumbents by voting
for an alternative in the next election (e.g., Fiorina, 1981; Key, 1966). This
straightforward reward-punishment connection notwithstanding, there is a
sense that the observed relationship is a good deal more complicated than
what first meets the eye. Indeed, current scholarship on the economy and
the vote postulates a more nuanced relationship between the economy and
voting behavior. We argue in this chapter that while the field has advanced
through increasing methodological rigor and conceptual sophistication in

Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

pursuit of this nuance, future work should return to foundational theoretical
questions on the meaning of economic voting.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Beginning with Kramer’s (1971) pioneering study, early work in the field
honed in on two primary theoretical considerations: first, whether voters
were backward- or forward-looking in applying economic information to
vote considerations, and second, whether citizens viewed the economy in
terms of their own pocketbooks or in terms of national performance indicators. These foundational studies by and large concluded that the economy
influences voter behavior by way of retrospective assessments of the performance of the nation’s economy (e.g., Feldman, 1982; Fiorina, 1981; Kinder &
Kiewiet, 1981). When citizens perceive that the incumbent administration has
overseen a decline in the nation’s economic health during their tenure, they
will be more likely to support the opposition on Election Day (c.f. MacKuen,
Erikson, & Stimson, 1992).
However, rather than clarifying this basic relationship, subsequent research
has muddied the waters. This turn, unfortunate from the perspective of
cumulating knowledge, is attributable to two developments. First, scholars
have sought to understand why economic voting is stronger in some contexts
than others. Earlier studies identified strong evidence for economic voting in
some electoral contexts, such as US Presidential elections, and inconsistent
evidence in others (e.g., Kramer, 1971). This so-called “instability dilemma”
(Paldam, 1991) emerged owing to a step-by-step process of methodological
refinement in the field, coupled with the increasing availability of survey
data from regions such as Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe,
and sub-Saharan Africa. More recent studies in the field have solved this
dilemma by investigating a diverse set of contextual variables thought to
influence the strength of the economic vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008;
Hellwig & Samuels, 2008; Hobolt, Tilley, & Banducci, 2013).
This cross-national literature reinvigorated the study of economic voting.
With time, however, observers such as Anderson (2007) have argued that the
widening array of conditioning factors proposed by these studies has left
us with an insurmountable “contingency dilemma”: the array of variables
now known to influence the strength of economic voting across context has
obfuscated more general patterns. However, even if contextual conditions
could be identified, we argue that specifying the mechanisms through which
fluctuations in national economic conditions bear on citizens’ vote choices is
an even more important—and perhaps more difficult—task.1 One has only
1. Cross-national studies of economic voting in particular have had little to say about the individual
voter’s decision process. Partial exceptions are Gomez and Wilson (2006) and Hellwig (2011).

Economic Models of Voting

3

to scan recent entries to the literature to get a wide range of purported pathways between the economy and the vote (e.g., Duch & Stevenson, 2008, p. 29;
Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming), p. 11; Tilley & Hobolt, 2011, p. 318). Namely,
attempts to understand how citizens’ subjective perceptions of the economy are
formed and brought to bear on vote choice will be important in determining
the direction of the field in the near future. Scholars have recently discovered that subjective economic evaluations are shaped by important latent
and short-term forces (e.g., Duch, Palmer, & Anderson, 2000; Evans & Andersen, 2006). These evaluations are now known to contain biases that derive
from personal characteristics and institutional forces such as partisan identification and media coverage (e.g., Bartels, 2008; Evans & Pickup, 2010; Hetherington, 1996). As Healy and Malhotra (2013, p. 286) observe, voters do
not merely lack knowledge. Rather, they appear to make substantial, consistent, and correlated errors in judgment. Ultimately, the subjective nature
of citizens’ perceptions of the economy—and the extent to which they are
grounded in some objective reality–complicates models of economic voting,
requiring a deeper understanding of just how the economy relates to decisions at the ballot box. The simple reward-punishment model may not be so
simple after all.
BEYOND THE INSTABILITY DILEMMA
INSTABILITY ACROSS ELECTORAL CONTEXT
A major task for scholars of economic voting is determining what causes
variation in the strength of the relationship between economic performance
and voting behavior. In recent years, the field has identified numerous
contextual-level forces that serve to strengthen or diminish this relationship.
Perhaps the most important of such developments concerns the “clarity of
responsibility” afforded to citizens by the institutional arrangement in their
polity. Powell and Whitten (1993) identify a set of institutional factors—such
as coalition government, bicameralism, opposition power sharing, and party
cohesion—that govern the extent incumbents are deemed responsible for
economic outcomes. For example, institutions such as coalition government
in list proportional representation systems can serve to obscure the target of
responsibility for economic performance, yielding a diminished relationship
between the economy and the vote.2 Notions of the “clarity of responsibility”
have now been applied and modified several times over, representing a
major step forward in specifying connection between the economy and
election outcomes (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Bengtsson, 2004; Hellwig &
2. The availability of clearly defined alternatives to the incumbent party—capturing aspects of the
party system such as fragmentation and volatility—is another aspect of clarity of responsibility which
has received consistent empirical support (Anderson, 2000; Paldam, 1991; Lewis-Beck, 1988).

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Samuels, 2008; Hobolt et al., 2013; Van der Eijk, Franklin, Demant, & van der
Brug, 2007).
Moving beyond the clarity of responsibility, researchers have turned
to investigate other sources of cross-national variation in the strength of
economic voting. Duch and Stevenson’s (2008) important study strives to
solve the instability dilemma through a rational choice theory of citizens’
evaluations of government competence. The authors reason that citizens
utilize imperfect information to distinguish between fluctuations in the
macroeconomy, which can be attributed to the actions of domestic political
actors, and fluctuations, which are the result of exogenous forces. Only
when voters can identify the degree to which domestic political actors have
influenced economic outcomes can they extract the “competency signal”:
the burden of responsibility for good or bad economic times shouldered by
incumbent politicians. Duch and Stevenson’s economic voter is rationally
retrospective rather than overwhelmed by institutional complexity, as
much of the cross-national research has it. The authors’ microfoundational
approach therefore sharpens our understanding of the economic vote.
Among other pay-offs, this signal-extraction theory helps to explain why
more open economies demonstrate weaker economic voting (Hellwig, 2001):
such economies are more susceptible to exogenous shocks, obscuring the
competency signal for citizens seeking to reward or punish incumbents at
the ballot box.
INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL HETEROGENEITY IN ECONOMIC VOTING
A second line of research confronts instability dilemmas in economic voting
by modeling variation across individuals rather than across macro-contexts.
In light of the established wisdom that citizens, by and large, possess only
rudimentary knowledge of political affairs, how can we expect electorates to
reward politicians to meet performance expectations and punish those who
do not?
There are several answers to this field-defining question. One is that information about the economy is sufficiently prevalent that even the marginally
informed can use it to make reasonable decisions at the ballot box. Fiorina
(1981, p. 5) concisely captures this view in his assertion that “in order to
ascertain whether the incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens
only need to calculate the changes in their own welfare.” A second approach
is to identify variations in individuals’ capacity to cast an economic vote.
Some individuals may consider the economy to be more salient than others
(Singer, 2011a, 2011b). Further, some individuals lack the cognitive capacity to link some types of economic information to distal political actors such
as the President and members of Congress (Gomez & Wilson, 2001). Low

Economic Models of Voting

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sophisticates will be unable to link personal economic experiences to political forces, because it is less cognitively demanding to associate such experiences with one’s immediate surroundings. Only the most sophisticated citizens, then, can link their personal economic experiences with their political
behavior.
A third inroad into understanding cross-individual variation in economic
voting is to examine how different aspects of the economy are incorporated
into the voter’s calculus (e.g., Lewis-Beck & Nadeau, 2011; Lewis-Beck,
Nadeau, & Foucault, 2012). This work acknowledges that the economy
is not just incorporated into the vote as a “reward-punishment” valence
consideration pertaining to management competence, but also may be
viewed through a positional lens, in the Downsian3 sense—with some
individuals preferring economic outcomes that, for instance, reduce unemployment or redistribute wealth, while others evaluate politicians favorably
for overseeing steady growth and stable prices. Voters may additionally
view the economy in terms of the means of production. This “patrimonial”
dimension states that voters are supportive of politicians whose policies
serve the value of the assets they own.
NEW DIRECTIONS: REEVALUATING THE ECONOMIC
VOTING MECHANISM
Thus far, we have explored some of the myriad ways in which instability in
the economic voting signal occurs both across contexts and across citizens.
While the further investigation of these contextual aspects of economic voting is likely to continue in years to come, we argue that the field should pay
greater attention to a new set of questions—questions that equal or arguably
surpass the instability dilemma in theoretical significance. These concerns
pertain to the causal link between economics and politics, to sources of bias
in economic evaluations, and to the role of elite communications. We observe
that while much of the nascent literature on these subjects is concerned with
the confounding effects of political dispositions (such as partisan identity) on
the economic vote, more should be done to understand the role of subjective
evaluations in the relationship between economic inequality and politics.
ENDOGENEITY AND SUBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS
The first of such challenges is the identification of endogeneity between subjective perceptions of the economy and citizens’ vote choices (Bartels, 2002;
3. Downs’ (1957) rational-choice theory of voting behavior posits that politicians position their platforms on any given policy dimension to appeal to the median voter.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Evans & Andersen, 2006; Evans & Pickup, 2010, Gerber & Huber, 2009). Traditionally, theories of economic voting have embraced the proposition that
citizens form relatively accurate judgments of the objective economy, which
are then used to reward or punish incumbents. Recent studies, however, have
challenged this normatively appealing view by demonstrating that citizens
likely form judgments of the economy which are strongly influenced by their
pre-existing political preferences (cf. Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, & Elias, 2008). At
the beginning of election campaigns, many citizens come to quickly favor
candidates on the basis of convenient heuristics such as partisanship, and
then utilize motivated learning (e.g., Taber & Lodge, 2006) to form biased
judgments of the economy. These judgments reduce cognitive dissonance by
affirming the competency of the preferred candidate, despite the fact that
an unbiased learning process might actually reveal deficiencies in the candidate’s economic competency. Without accounting for this potential endogeneity, we may be strongly overstating the magnitude of economic voting
across a diverse set of electoral contexts.
Assertions of endogeneity put scrutiny to the mechanism underlying
economic voting. If politics shapes economic perceptions rather than the
other way around, then the implication is a disconnect between actual
economic conditions and how the public perceives them. If it is true that
the voter acts as “rational god of vengeance and reward” (Key, 1966, p.
568), then we should expect citizens to link observed economic indicators to
their vote choices. However, as Kramer (1983) first observed, in empirical
models of individual-level vote choice, findings regarding the effects of
subjective economic perceptions on citizens’ vote choice often do not
square with results from investigations of the effect of macrolevel economic
variables such as the unemployment rate and GDP. Conflicting evidence
from micro-subjective and macro-objective level studies of economic voting
represents a major challenge to knowledge accumulation in the field. Do
potential biases in the subjective evaluations of individual citizens confound
the study of economic voting using individual-level data?
We argue that subjective economic evaluations may still be useful indicators of the effects of economic performance on vote choice. However,
some authors have employed statistical strategies for “decontaminating”
these variables and obtaining unbiased estimates (Nadeau, Lewis-Beck, &
Bélanger, 2013). Many scholars argue that instrumental variable estimation
is now required to estimate the causal impact of economic perceptions on
vote choice owing to endogeneity, and in turn have proposed several useful
instruments that may be utilized by future research (Anderson et al., 2004;
Evans & Pickup, 2010; Fraile & Lewis-Beck, 2010; Lewis-Beck et al., 2008).
While Lewis-Beck et al. (2008) utilize panel data to construct a series of
instrumental variables based on respondents’ prior partisanship, Evans and

Economic Models of Voting

7

Pickup (2010) criticize the construction of these instruments on the basis of
model specification and propose a rival structural equation panel model.
Hansford and Gomez (2013) approach the endogeneity problem from a
slightly different angle, by constructing an instrument from cross-sectional
data. Regardless of the approach used, statistical “fixes” such as instrumental
variables and two-stage modeling have become commonplace.
However, the quest for unbiased and consistent parameter estimates
should not cause analysts to lose sight of economic voting’s foundational
connection to electoral accountability. The construction of structural equation
models should be paired with the construction of theoretically compelling
causal narratives. In contrast to this methodological corrective, we join a
second group of scholars in arguing that subjective economic evaluations
should be reconceptualized, instead of reestimated. As Stevenson and Duch
(2013) suggests, subjective assessments are analytically useful not because
we now possess methods for better estimating their effects, but because such
measures adhere most closely to the theory of economic voting advanced by
the field’s earliest practitioners. Interpreted by some merely as “noise” (e.g.,
Van der Brug, Van der Eijk, & Franklin, 2007), variation in subjective economic evaluations gives us an important insight into citizens’ acquisition of
economic information. Some citizens are more optimistic about the economy
than others, independent of the “objective” state of the economy that has
been agreed upon by experts. According to Stevenson and Duch (2013), this
natural variation is a function of citizens’ exposure to economic information
by way of media consumption, of personal experiences, and of partisan
proclivities. Statistically purging economic evaluations of these important
determinants is akin to stripping these opinions of the psychological and
institutional contexts in which they operate. Subjective evaluations, in this
sense, are analytically useful: they may be contaminated by endogeneity, but
they largely parallel the effects of aggregate indicators in dozens of studies.
Joining the debate from a third perspective, Lewis-Beck et al. (2013) attempt
to overcome discrepancies in the effects of objective macro measures and of
subjective micro assessments by constructing a microlevel model of incumbent support across a series of eight elections in Denmark. By drawing from
precise estimates of economic retrospections reported in additional surveys
of voters, the authors construct an exogenous, aggregate measure of average
economic perceptions for each election. This aggregate “economic perception” variable is a strong predictor of the vote, alongside variables such as
individual-level ideology and aggregate economic statistics.
This debate regarding the “Kramer problem” will likely continue to play
a major role in future scholarship. Understanding subjective evaluations
requires a deeper conceptual understanding of the phenomenon of economic
voting, and no methodological corrective will fully solve the problem. What

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

can cross-sectional patterns in subjective economic perceptions tell us about
economic voting? We should continue to explore such dynamics, within and
across electorates, to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the role of the
economy in citizens’ voting behavior.
STRENGTH VERSUS BIAS IN ECONOMIC EVALUATIONS
To that end, we should move away from investigating the strength of
association between subjective evaluations and vote choice and toward a
consideration of the nature of the evaluations themselves. Where economic
retrospections were previously thought to be acquired passively, by way
of accurate, readily accessible information channels (MacKuen et al., 1992;
Mutz, 1992), some have shown that subjective evaluations can be biased by
these and other forces (e.g., Aidt, 2000; Hetherington, 1996; Hopkins, 2012;
Shah, Watts, Domke, & Fan, 2002; Stevenson & Duch, 2013). The result is a
new emphasis on modeling individual economic perceptions. Extant contributions that accord with this idea have revisited an earlier literature (e.g.,
Conover, Feldman, & Knight, 1986) that sought to distinguish which economic indicators play the strongest role in influencing subjective economic
perceptions. For example, Fauvelle-Aymar and Stegmaier (2013) investigate
the association between US stock market growth and Presidential approval,
finding that the trends are more closely linked than previously thought.
Such findings point to the notion that subjective economic perceptions
are not made up of a balanced amalgam of current economic conditions
as measured by professional economists, but rather critically depend on
the content of intermediary information being passed to citizens through
the news.
Another form of bias in economic voting—and one carrying considerable
normative implications—has been identified by Bartels (2008, cf. Hopkins,
2012). Even if they have found themselves relatively worse off in the period
before an election, low-income Americans consistently prefer presidential
candidates who have overseen economic success not in general terms
but targeted specifically to the very wealthy. While American voters are
indeed employing retrospective performance evaluations, this research
implies that they do so on the basis of the wrong economic indicators.
As for what explains this “class bias,” Bartels (2008) provides a relatively
ambiguous response. As seen above, recent efforts to better understand
the determinants of subjective economic evaluations are well-positioned to
examine why Americans are voting on the basis of class-biased economic
information. If Americans’ subjective economic retrospections are tinted by
class-based lenses, what factors are responsible for shifts in middle-class
citizen’s evaluations away from their own objective well-being?

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FRAMING THE ECONOMY: SIGNALS FROM TRUSTED ELITES
A related area ripe for further exploration pertains to how elites communicate news about the economy. Until recently, scholars have largely ignored
this issue. Important exceptions include Mutz (1992), who argues that mass
media increase their role as an intermediary among the national politics,
economics, and the perceptions of the average American, and Hetherington (1996), who shows how negative reporting of the economy by the media
shaped public perceptions and may have contributed to incumbent president
George Bush’s defeat in the 1992 election. Media effects have received more
sustained attention in recent years, however, as scholars have sought inroads
into understanding perceptual biases (e.g., Kayser & Peress, (forthcoming);
Soroka, 2006).
In addition to the media, politicians themselves can shape the economic
vote. Politicians can strategically (de)emphasize economic issues by choosing
to devote greater or lesser emphasis to it in election campaigns (Grafstrom
& Salmond, (n.d.)) or by shifting their position-taking behavior with respect
to economic policies (Hellwig, 2012). Systemic corruption may also interfere
with economic accountability—and in turn, positive swings in economic performance can allow corrupt officials a “free pass” on election day (Tavits,
2007; Zechmeister & Zizumbo-Colunga, 2013).
CONCLUSION: A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP
While the relationship between economic performance and vote choice
has been empirically verified in many electoral contexts across decades of
research, the mechanism that links these two concepts together is still not
fully understood. Scholars have been successful in expanding the scope
of inquiry in the field by investigating economic voting in new regions of
the world and at diverse levels of government, and this endeavor should
continue to spark creative new research propositions in the future. Perhaps
the most fruitful avenue for future inquiry in the field, however, concerns
the very definition of economic voting. Does it require an assessment of
objective economic conditions? If so, do all voters experience the same objective reality? If not, what do we make of the relationship between subjective
economic retrospections and citizens’ vote choices, given that the causal
arrow likely flows in both directions? Is bias in economic voting something
to be corrected from a statistical standpoint, or is this patterned variation
meaningful in its own right? While we should continue to investigate how
the strength of economic voting is conditioned by electoral context and
individual characteristics, we should also be asking what this relationship
means from a theoretical and, ultimately, normative perspective. For, at

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

the end of the day, the resilient attraction of the economic vote lies in its
connection to electoral accountability.
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IAN G. ANSON SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Ian G. Anson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at
Indiana University Bloomington. He is broadly interested in political communication, voting behavior, the politics of inequality, quantitative methodology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. His dissertation seeks to
understand how biases in Americans’ economic perceptions are shaped by
developments in contemporary American media institutions. Ian completed
a BA in political science and contemporary European studies at UNC-Chapel
Hill, and holds an MS in applied statistics from Indiana University.
TIMOTHY HELLWIG SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Timothy Hellwig is an Associate Professor of political science and Director
of the Institute for European Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His
research and teaching interests are in comparative political economy, political behavior, European politics, and research methods. His work on these
areas has appeared in several journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. His
book manuscript, Globalization and Mass Politics: Retaining the Room to Maneuver, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He holds a BA from St.
Cloud State University, an MA from American University, and a PhD from
the University of Minnesota. He has also been a researcher at the International Foundation for Election Systems, on the faculty at the University of
Houston, and a visiting researcher at the University of Essex and at Gothenburg University.
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Economic Models of Voting