Sociotropic Voting

1
Sociotropic Voting

• Last time Retrospective voting
• Sociotropic voting

2
Retrospective voting

• Voters have incentives to ignore/discount
  campaign rhetoric
• hard to contract with voters to follow through on
  promises
• Retrospective voting does not demand much from
  voters
• Are you better off (worse off) today than you
  were last time? Punish or reward incumbent
• If voters are retrospective, incumbents will be
  motivated to do good, fix/avoid problems
• but what is the time frame, on what issues?

3
More retrospection

• Kiewiet and Rivers the thesis of the
  retrospective voting literature is that vote
  choice is driven by evaluations of outcomes and
  leads to pro/con assessments of incumbents.
• what outcomes matter?
• what dynamics relate past outcomes to present
  choices?
• who or what is the incumbent?
• Implication campaigns and candidates may be
  second-order considerations at best in vote
  choices

4
Political business cycles?

• If voters memories are short (fast decay), pols
  will have incentives to prime the pump as
  elections approach
• cyclical policies might be worse than smooth
• but if investors understand PBC incentives, they
  will rationally anticipate economic policy
  changes, dampening their effects (rational
  expectations)
• cycles seem more likely where markets cant
  easily counteract policy-oriented actions
  (constituency service, position-taking,
  distributive/redistributive policies, etc.)

5
Pocketbook voting?

• evidence suggests aggregate-level relationship
  between economic outcomes and vote shares
• Is retrospective voting driven by personal
  circumstances?
• Pocketbook voting is relatively hard
• how much of your circumstances do you blame on
  others, how much on yourself?
• usual story sophisticated individuals can
  disentangle effects better

6
Sociotropic voting

• respond to aggregate outcomes more so than
  personal ones, because attribution for
  responsibility is easier
• standard story less sophisticated voters lean
  heavily on aggregate outcomes to evaluate
  incumbent
• most studies show relatively strong evidence of
  sociotropic effects, weak evidence of pocketbook
  effects