A cross-national study of the effect of economic conditions on voting behavior in the United States and the Western democracies

Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. This title provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors - politicians as well as voters - are only boundedly rational.

The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today

This book examines how electoral laws, the timing of election, the ideological orientation of governments, and the nature of competition between political parties influence unemployment, economic growth, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. The book presents both a thorough overview of the theoretical literature and a vast amount of empirical evidence.

This book proposes a selection model for explaining cross-national variation in economic voting: Rational voters condition the economic vote on whether incumbents are responsible for economic outcomes, because this is the optimal way to identify and elect competent economic managers under conditions of uncertainty. This model explores how political and economic institutions alter the quality of the signal that the previous economy provides about the competence of candidates. The rational economic voter is also attentive to strategic cues regarding the responsibility of parties for economic outcomes and their electoral competitiveness. Theoretical propositions are derived, linking variation in economic and political institutions to variability in economic voting. The authors demonstrate that there is economic voting, and that it varies significantly across political contexts. The data consist of 165 election studies conducted in 19 different countries over a 20-year time period.

Do voters look to the past, the future, or both when deciding how to vote? In Do Voters Look to the Future?, Brad Lockerbie shows voters to be more sophisticated than much of the work in political science would suggest. He argues that voters do not simply reward or punish the incumbent administration, but instead make a comparative evaluation of the likely performance of each candidate and vote for the one that will most likely provide them with a prosperous future. Making use of data from 1956 through the present, Lockerbie finds that voters take into account both what has happened and what they think will happen when they vote. He finds these economic evaluations to be strongly related to voting behavior both for the House and the Senate, as well as the presidency. Additionally, Lockerbie examines the role of these economic items to explain changes in party identification.

Economic conditions are said to affect election outcomes, but past research has produced unstable and contradictory findings. This book argues that these problems are caused by the failure to take account of electoral competition between parties. A research strategy to correct this problem is designed and applied to investigate effects of economic conditions on (individual) voter choices and (aggregate) election outcomes over 42 elections in 15 countries. It shows that economic conditions exert small effects on individual party preferences, which can have large consequences for election outcomes. In countries where responsibility for economic policy is clear, voters vote retrospectively and reward or punish incumbent parties - although in coalition systems smaller government parties often gain at the expense of the largest party when economic conditions deteriorate. Where clarity of responsibility for economic policy is less clear, voters vote more prospectively on the basis of expected party policies.

This book raises and addresses questions about the consequences of democratic institutions for economic performance.

Economic voting is a phenomenon that political scientists and economists can hardly overlook. There is ample evidence for a strong link between economic conditions and government popularity. However, not everything is that simple and this edited collection focuses on 'the comparative puzzle' of economic voting. Economic Voting emphasises the importance of comparative research design and argues that the psychology of the economic voter model needs to be developed further.

This book presents a collection of papers illustrating the variety of "experimental" methodologies used to study voting. Experimental methods include laboratory experiments in the tradition of political psychology, laboratory experiments with monetary incentives, in the economic tradition, survey experiments (varying survey, question wording, framing or content), as well as various kinds of field experimentation. Topics include the behavior of voters (in particular turnout, vote choice, and strategic voting), the behavior of parties and candidates, and the comparison of electoral rules.