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Looking to the Future: A Better Way to Study Prospective Economic Voting
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Tucker, Joshua A. Michelitch, Kristin Morales-Barba, Marco Owen, Andrew |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | The study of prospective economic voting has been plagued by inconsistent results. In this manuscript, we identify a fundamental problem with the primary way in which prospective economic evaluations have been measured in prior studies, and, equally importantly, also oer a solution that we hope will push the study of prospective economic voting in exciting new directions in the future. More specically, we argue that the standard prospective economic expectation survey question - \how will the economy perform over the next 12 months?" - contains an unacceptably large degree of measurement error. Since respondents’ beliefs about the economic future likely depend in part on who wins the upcoming election, existing work utilizing pre-election surveys is problematic because we can not know which potential economic future respondents are thinking of when they answer this standard question. Our solution turns to Downs’ (1957) original formulation of prospective voting, which calls for eliciting prospective economic evaluations conditioning on which party wins the election. Using pre-election survey data from the 2008 American and Ghanaian elections, we show that the majority of voters do believe that future economic conditions will dier based on which party wins oce in the upcoming election. Similar ndings in both an advanced wealthy democracy and a poor patronage democracy give added weight to the manuscript’s concluding recommendation: studies designed to analyze prospective economic voting should employ conditional prospective economic evaluation questions and choice-specic econometric models. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.politics.ubc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/poli_sci/Faculty/aowen/EconVoteMethod.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
