Journal ArticleDOI
A New View of Political Accountability for Economic Performance
TLDR
This article developed a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes, but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies, and found that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by voters that assume voter naivete.Abstract:
Most political support models imply that in evaluating economic performance, voters use a standard that would provide poor predictions of the future and leave the economy vulnerable to manipulation by vote-hungry politicians. Drawing on macroeconomic theory, we develop a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes, but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies. We find that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by models that assume voter naivete.Our analysis questions the wisdom of measures typically used to assess voter evaluation of economic performance in a variety of theoretical contexts. The results also help to explain the absence of convincing evidence that governments exploit voter ignorance in manipulating the economy.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Incumbent performance and electoral control
TL;DR: In the pure theory of electoral competition, citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred as discussed by the authors. But these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability.
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes
TL;DR: The authors found that voters hold the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box, regardless of the democracy they vote in, and that good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out.
Journal ArticleDOI
Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the U.S. Economy.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, and found that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series.
Journal ArticleDOI
Public Support for European Integration: An Empirical Test of Five Theories
TL;DR: In this article, a regression analysis of Eurobarometer surveys from the period 1978-1992 shows that the partisan context of integrative reforms and the utilitarian consequences of integration policy provide robust explanations for variation in support.
Book
The Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results
TL;DR: A Contextual Theory of Rational Retrospective Economic Voting: Competency signals and rational retrospective economic voting as mentioned in this paper was proposed to define and measure the economic vote in Western democracies, and it was shown that economic variation and its sources can be traced to economic voting.
References
More filters
Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Journal ArticleDOI
Long-term contracts, rational expectations and the optimal money supply rule
TL;DR: In this paper, a model with overlapping labor contracts with each labor contract being made for two periods was constructed, and the authors argued that monetary policy has the ability to affect the short run behavior of output, though it has no effects on long run output behavior.