Macro vs

Many of the findings regarding economic voting derive from the micro-level analyses of survey data, in which respondents’ survey evaluations of the economy are shown to predict the vote. This paper investigates the causal nature of this relationship and argues that cross-sectional consistency between economic evaluations and vote choice is mainly if not entirely due to vote choice influencing the survey response. Moreover, the evidence suggest that apart from this endogenously induced partisan bias, almost all of the cross-sectional variation in survey evaluations of the economy is random noise rather than actual beliefs about economic conditions In surveys, the mean evaluations reflect the economic signal that predicts the aggregate vote. Following Kramer (1983), economic voting is best studied at the macro-level rather than the micro-level. This paper has benefited by the comments of Joseph Bafumi, Charles Franklin, Kathleen Knight, Christopher Wlezien, seminar participants at Princeton University, and participants in the Workshop on Casual Inference using Survey Data, Nuffield College, Oxford University. Macro vs. Micro-Level Perspectives on Economic Voting: Is the Micro-Level Evidence Endogenously Induced? . Robert S. Erikson Columbia University The idea that economic conditions affect election outcomes is firmly embedded in the lore of electoral politics. In the case of US presidential elections, an overwhelming body of evidence indicates that the economy influences the vote. At the macro-level, objective measures of economic growth predict electoral support for the incumbent presidential party (Tufte, 1978, Hibbs, 1987; Fair, 2002; Lewis-Beck and Rice, 1992; Erikson, 1989). Macro-level measures of the subjective economy (e.g., the Index of Consumer Sentiment) also predict the vote (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson, 2002). At the micro-level, the consensus of numerous survey analyses is that voters are influenced by their subjective views of the national economy, even though they are not much swayed by their personal economic standing (Fiorina, 1981; Kinder and Kiewiet, 1979; Kiewiet, 1983; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke, 1989). It is micro-level research that provides most of the findings regarding the psychological mechanisms connecting the economy to the voter. Evidently, economic voting is “sociotropic,” with voters responding to their beliefs about the state of the overall economy rather than to their personal pocketbooks. But doubts can be raised about what we can learn about economic voting from individual survey respondents. 1 In extreme, it has been argued not just that the economy matters but that the economy is virtually all that matters, apart from incumbency, trumping other variables in the political environment (Fair, 2002). Within political science, a common interpretation is that political variables such as the candidates themselves and the quality of their campaigns are of little importance as voter preferences march toward the electoral outcome that is largely destined by the state of the national economy. (See Gelman and King, 1993).