Economic perceptions and voting behavior in US presidential elections

Economic Voting and Economic Inequality: US Presidential Elections

Researchers and pundits alike view the state of the national economy as a key determinant of vote decisions and election outcomes: voters reward or punish the incumbent party as national economic conditions improve or decline. In an era of rising income inequality, however, national conditions provide relatively poor information to voters about how the incumbent is handling the economy in their...

Economic Voting in Gubernatorial Elections

There is a large literature on economic voting in the United States, which shows that the economy matters in presidential and congressional elections. Puzzlingly, however, the state politics literature has failed to find clear evidence for economic voting in gubernatorial elections. In this study, I use population-based datasets of state and county-level economic conditions from 1969-2016 to ex...

Electoral College Alternatives and US Presidential Elections

The President of the United States is chosen directly by the Electoral College, although indirectly the citizens select the President. Different states currently employ two systems of electoral-vote allocation under the Electoral College framework: the widely adopted winner-take-all system and the system adopted by Maine and Nebraska. The properties of these two systems are analyzed against the...

An Historical Assessment of US Presidential Elections

Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

$EVWUDFW A simple “Bread and Peace” model shows that aggregate votes for President in postwar elections were determined entirely by weighted-average growth of real disposable personal income per capita during the incumbent party’s term and the cumulative numbers of American military personnel killed in action as a result of U.S. interventions in the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars. The model i...