Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11109-016-9359-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Replication Materials The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate the analyses in this article are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910%2FDVN%2FDIIQF7. & Dean Lacy [email protected] Dino P. Christenson [email protected] 1 Department of Government, Dartmouth College, HB 6108, Hanover, NH 03755, USA 2 Department of Political Science, Boston University, 232 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, USA 123 Polit Behav DOI 10.1007/s11109-016-9359-3