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Sociotropic Voting

Sociotropic Voting. Last time: Retrospective voting Sociotropic voting. Retrospective voting. Voters have incentives to ignore/discount campaign rhetoric hard to contract with voters to follow through on promises Retrospective voting does not demand much from voters

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Sociotropic Voting

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  1. Sociotropic Voting Last time: Retrospective voting Sociotropic voting

  2. Retrospective voting • Voters have incentives to ignore/discount campaign rhetoric • hard to contract with voters to follow through on promises • Retrospective voting does not demand much from voters • Are you better off (worse off) today than you were last time? Punish or reward incumbent • If voters are retrospective, incumbents will be motivated to do good, fix/avoid problems • but what is the time frame, on what issues?

  3. More retrospection • Kiewiet and Rivers: the thesis of the retrospective voting literature is that vote choice is driven by evaluations of outcomes and leads to pro/con assessments of incumbents. • what outcomes matter? • what dynamics relate past outcomes to present choices? • who or what is the “incumbent”? • Implication: campaigns and candidates may be second-order considerations at best in vote choices

  4. Political business cycles? • If voters’ memories are short (fast decay), pols will have incentives to “prime the pump” as elections approach • cyclical policies might be worse than smooth • but if investors understand PBC incentives, they will rationally anticipate economic policy changes, dampening their effects (rational expectations); • cycles seem more likely where markets can’t easily counteract policy-oriented actions (constituency service, position-taking, distributive/redistributive policies, etc.)

  5. Pocketbook voting? • evidence suggests aggregate-level relationship between economic outcomes and vote shares • Is retrospective voting driven by personal circumstances? • Pocketbook voting is relatively hard • how much of your circumstances do you blame on others, how much on yourself? • usual story: sophisticated individuals can disentangle effects better

  6. Sociotropic voting • respond to aggregate outcomes more so than personal ones, because attribution for responsibility is easier • standard story: less sophisticated voters lean heavily on aggregate outcomes to evaluate incumbent • most studies show relatively strong evidence of sociotropic effects, weak evidence of pocketbook effects

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