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Aggregate Economic Variables and Votes for Congress: A Rejoinder*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Francisco Arcelus  and
Allan H. Meltzer
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Extract

Our interest in the effect of aggregate economic variables on election results began in 1970 following a conversation with an administration official that we have reported elsewhere. We doubted both the implicit theory of voting behavior and the ability of the administration to achieve rates of inflation and unemployment even close to the ranges mentioned. We take this opportunity to note that the unemployment rate was higher and the inflation rate substantially higher than the adviser's estimate, but President Nixon was reelected.

At the time, the principal econometric evidence of the effects of aggregate economic variables was a study by Kramer. Kramer found evidence of an effect of real income, but despite (or perhaps because of) the flaws in his procedure, he found no evidence of an effect of inflation or unemployment. Furthermore, then and now, most of the reported evidence pertains to congressional not presidential elections and to votes for congressmen, not seats in the Congress.

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Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 1266 - 1269
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

We remain indebted to the National Science Foundation for support of our work.

References

1 See footnote 2 of our paper, “The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables on Congressional Elections” elsewhere in this issue of the Review.

2 See Kramer, G. H., “Short-Term Fluctuations in U. S. Voting Behavior, 1896-1964,” this Review, 65 (03, 1971), 131–143 Google Scholar. Our discussion of the flaw in Kramer's treatment of minor party votes is in footnote 16 of our paper. Once an error in the data was corrected, the effect of inflation was found to be significant.

3 Bloom and Price accept our argument that voters can abstain, but their work neglects the influence of economic conditions on participation.

4 Goodman, Saul and Kramer, Gerald H., “Commentary on Arcelus and Meltzer,” APSR 69 (12, 1975), p. 1255–1265 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 1264.

6 The rest of the paragraph from which the quotation is drawn leaves little doubt about the meaning of the proposition. The paragraph states that changes in participation have a partisan (shift) effect.

7 We made available to Goodman and Kramer a printout of all of our results, including computations of the covariance matrix and other intermediate results to facilitate comparisons. We are therefore surprised and puzzled at comments about our errors. If there are errors in our data or computations, Goodman and Kramer should report them instead of offering suggestive hints.

8 One point on which comment is required: Goodman and Kramer note (p. 1260) that there are some substantial discrepancies between their estimates and the results shown in Table 1 of our paper. We have used both sets of data and, aside from differences attributable to computer routines, we find no substantial differences in results.

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