Are Voters Irrational? the Uneducated and Partisan Ones Are

This paper uses state-level election returns and individual-level survey data to show that American voters have systematically punished the incumbent party for extreme weather in presidential election years. A moderate drought has cost the incumbent party an average of 2.6 percent of the presidential vote in rural areas, with no significant effect in urban and suburban areas. Weather’s impact has diminished over time as agriculture’s economic importance has decreased. The results indicate that a voter’s partisan preferences and education predict his rationality. Election-year weather does not significantly affect the behavior of moderate voters or those voters who have attended college. The idea that voters respond to economic conditions accords with casual observation, has been verified by empirical research, and is almost universally accepted by political scientists. While there is little doubt that voters engage in economic voting, different causes appear to motivate economic voting in different environments. It has generally been argued that economic voting in the United States arises from “sociotropic” behavior, as voters respond primarily to national economic conditions (Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, Markus 1988). In a variety of other countries, personal financial conditions, or “pocketbook” concerns, have apparently had greater influence on voters (Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000; Gomez and Wilson 2006). Whether voters are motivated by sociotropic or pocketbook concerns, it is unclear to what extent economic voting is a rational act. If voters either use economic conditions to ascertain the extent to which the incumbent is responsible for past and current conditions or to predict how the incumbent’s reelection will affect future conditions, then economic voting may be rational. Recent research provides evidence in favor of this model of rational economic voting. It appears that well-informed voters are more likely to engage in economic voting (Krause 1997; Duch 2001; Gomez and Wilson 2006). Also, voters show a greater tendency towards economic voting in those countries where responsibility for economic policies can be more clearly assigned to a specific individual or party (Powell and Whitten 1993). Although these results suggest that economic voting may be at least somewhat rational, there is little evidence to suggest that voters effectively link policies to economic conditions. In fact, many economists believe that the connections between a president’s policies and short-run growth are either slight or nonexistent. Two different explanations, then, could account for the 1 The finding was first demonstrated for American voters (Kramer 1971; Fair 1978) and has since been demonstrated in a range of countries, including France (Lewis-Beck 1983), Germany (Alford and Legge 1984), and Canada (Monroe and Erickson 1986). Economic voting has also been investigated in many comparative studies (Paldam 1991; Powell and Whitten 1993).