Economic Performance, Job Insecurity, and Electoral Choice (original) (raw)

The mass political economy literature concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people may h a ve. In a neo-liberal economic climate characterized by a downsized labor market and the retrenchment of government welfare entitlements, one such widely-publicized concern is job insecurity. This article shows that job insecurity i s a n o vel form of discontent that is independent of the retrospective evaluations of short-term performance that are the stu of the mainstream mass political economy literature. At the same time, the political e ects of job insecurity are distinctive. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice in the 1996 U.S. presidential election, job insecurity is associated with support for the third-party candidate, Ross Perot, but, contrary to conventional wisdom, has no implications for turnout. Traditional retrospective e v aluations of economic performance explain the major-party v ote and abstention.