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
– 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?
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
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.)
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
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