Gubernatorial Disability

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...

The Political Economy of the Disability Insurance. Theory and Evidence of Gubernatorial Learning from Social Security Administration Monitoring

The dramatic rise in the disability insurance (DI) roles in the last 20 years has been the subject of much controversy in both popular and academic circles. While, the relationship between DI and labor force participation has been the subject of a growing literature, the mechanism of this transition from employment to DI remains unclear. We hypothesize that one mechanism is the state-level admi...

Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections.

We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections in our study, and their importance survives a range of controls, including state fixed effects. I...

Are Voters Rational? Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections

Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect politicians who deliver favorable outcomes. A second implication is that rational voters will not support a politician because of good outcomes unrelated to the politician’s actions. Specifically, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise, both in order to avoid electing incompetent, but lucky politicians, a...

Gubernatorial Coattail Effects in State Legislative Elections