Economic Performance, Job Insecurity, and Electoral Choice (original) (raw)
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Canadian Public Policy / Analyse de Politiques, 2000
Les Libéraux ont presque perdu leur majorité au parlement en 1997. Cet article démontre que les perceptions sur la situation du chômage a nuit aux Libéraux et leur a coûté le support de presque trois pourcent des votes. Nous examinons les raisons selon lesquelles les canadiens n'ont pas donné un jugement plus positif sur la situation du travail malgré une diminution du taux de chômage officiel au Canada durant le dernier mandat des Libéraux. Les résultats de cette recherche soulèvent de nombreuses questions sur les attitudes des voteurs en ce qui concerne la diffusion et la pénétration de l'information, tant générale qu'économique, dans l'électorat ainsi que sur les critères avec lesquels les voteurs jugent les gouvernements. L'étude examine finalement les incitatifs que ces gouvernements pourraient avoir dans la création des cycles des affaires politiques.
Beyond Opportunity Costs: Campaign Messages, Anger and Turnout among the Unemployed
British Journal of Political Science, 2020
Are people under economic stress more or less likely to vote, and why? With large observational datasets and a survey experiment involving unemployed Americans, we show that unemployment depresses participation. But it does so more powerfully when the unemployment rate is low, less powerfully when it is high. Whereas earlier studies have explained lower turnout among the unemployed by stressing the especially high opportunity costs these would-be voters face, our evidence points to the psychological effects of unemployment and of campaign messages about it. When unemployment is high, challengers have an incentive to blame the incumbent, thus eliciting anger among the unemployed. Psychologists have shown anger to be an approach or mobilizing emotion. When joblessness is low, campaigns tend to ignore it. The jobless thus remain in states of depression and self-blame, which are demobilizing emotions.
Employment, Party Economic Performance, and the Formation of Partisan Preferences
Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2000
In order to explore the formation of partisan preferences, this paper develops a political-economic model of the US providing micro-foundations for both the genesis and consequences of unemployment. It predicts the standard findings (1) that Democratic administrations are associated with higher economic growth than are Republican administrations; and (2) that the electorate's partisan preference is influenced by the relative likelihood of unemployment. These two patterns and the link between them are explained in terms of the decisions of rational agents facing uncertain elections and competitive labor markets. Specifically, differences in the parties' fiscal policies affect individuals' employment decisions. Agents use labor contracts to exploit the resulting economic uncertainty. The partisan preferences of the electorate are then influenced by employment status. This explanation avoids certain limitations in the work of Hibbs and Alesina.
Economic Discontent as a Mobilizer: Unemployment and Voter Turnout
Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the U.S. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are "under-penalized" for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county level data and find that, contrary to earlier studies, higher unemployment rates in fact stimulate more people to vote. We show that the effect is not the result of heightened electoral competition when unemployment is high. The relationship displays a partisan asymmetry in which Republican candidates are especially harmed by higher unemployment. The results also indicate that studies of economic voting need to consider the role of turnout in connecting economic performance to the incumbent's vote share.
Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018
Significance Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond theories emphasizing changes in issue salience to better understand the meaning of election outcomes when public preferences and candidates’ positions are changing.
The Insecure American: Economic Experiences, Financial Worries, and Policy Attitudes
Perspectives on Politics, 2013
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial eco...
The Effect of Income and Unemployment Shocks on Political Preferences
2017
Individuals’ political preferences are the result of a combination of selfinterest and beliefs about how the world works. While it is broadly accepted that expectations about social mobility in the long-run can aect political preferences today, much less is known about how voters update their preferences when reality does notmatch expectations. e goal of this paper is to understand the dynamics of political preferences over redistribution as new information about individual voters’ economic circumstances and experiences arrives in the form of unanticipated shocks to two key determinants of individual welfare: employment and income. We elicit and validate subjective probabilistic expectations over future employment and incomes in the short term and construct measures of anticipated and unanticipated shocks comparing expectations with realized outcomes, measured from third party reports, in a large panel. Our main result, based on xed eects specications allowing for interpersonal ...
Political Research Quarterly, 2018
What are the electoral impacts of perceptions of unemployment under different partisan persuasions of the government? Neither the literature on retrospective economic voting nor partisan voting has provided a compelling answer to this question. This paper addresses this puzzle by analyzing panel surveys and leveraging differences in government partisanship in two consecutive elections. I argue that negative evaluations of the employment situation induce voter transition to support a left-wing party under a right-wing government, but that such voter perceptions do not affect vote choice under a left-wing government. An analysis of a voter transition, using British Election Panel Study 1992–1997 and 1997–2001, reveals findings that support my argument. My argument suggests conditional partisan voting effects. Essentially, the effect of economic issues on vote choice is conditional on issue salience and which party “owns” the issue, namely, the varying levels of issue salience related ...