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The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables on Congressional Elections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Francisco Arcelus  and
Allan H. Meltzer
Francisco Arcelus
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
Allan H. Meltzer
Affiliation:
Carnegie-Mellon University
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Abstract

This paper uses rational voting behavior as an organizing device to develop a framework within which to consider the effect of economic aggregates on voters. Unlike most previous studies, ours permits the voter to vote for candidates of either party or to abstain. A principal finding is that the effect of the main economic aggregates on the participation rate is much clearer than the effects on either party. Our results deny that an incumbent administration can affect the control of Congress by stimulating the economy. Voters appear to make judgments about inflation, unemployment and economic growth. We investigated on the basis of long-term, not short-term performance.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 1232 - 1239
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1975

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Footnotes

*

We are indebted to Jay Kadane and Timothy McGuire for helpful comments, to Gerald Kramer for finding errors in our data, and to the National Science Foundation for financial support. An earlier version was presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Political Science Association.

References

1 A review of much of this literature can be found in Kramer, Gerald H., “Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896-1964,” American Political Science Review, 65 (03, 1971), 131–143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stigler, George J., “General Economic Conditions and National Elections,” American Economic Review, 63 (05, 1973), 160–167 Google Scholar.

2 Okun, Arthur M., “Comments on Stigler's Paper,” American Economic Review, 63 (05 1973), 172–177 Google Scholar. In fact, our interest in the subject started in 1970 after a discussion one of us had with Herbert Stein, then a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. Stein argued that the outcome of the 1972 election would depend on the ability of the administration to reduce inflation and aggregate unemployment to a specific range. A different view is expressed by former Chairman McCracken, Paul W. in “The Practice of Political Economy,” American Economic Review, 63 (05, 1973), 168–171 Google Scholar.

3 This position is taken by Stigler, and by Riker, William H., “Discussion,” American Economic Review, 63 (05, 1973), 178–179 Google Scholar.

4 Stigler.

5 Kramer, , “Short-term Fluctuations,” p. 141 Google Scholar.

6 See Goodhart, C. A. E. and Bhansali, R. J., “Political Economy,” Political Studies, 18 (1970), 43–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip S., Miller, Warren S., and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), esp. chaps. 6 and 7Google Scholar.

8 Campbell et al., chap. 4, and Flanigan, William H., Political Behavior of the American Electorate, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972)Google Scholar.

9 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar; Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tullock, Gordon, Toward a Mathematics of Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967)Google Scholar. Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 62 (03, 1968), 25–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapiro, Michael J., “Rational Political Man: A Synthesis of Economic and Social Psychological Perspectives,” American Political Science Review, 63 (12, 1969), 1106-19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKelvey, Richard D. and Ordeshook, Peter, “A General Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” in Mathematical Applications in Political Science, Vol. VI, ed. Herndon, James F. and Bernd, Joseph L. (Charlottesville, Virginia: The University of Virginia Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

10 See Riker and Ordeshook.

11 Tullock, p. 110-114, argues that in a typical election, there are many voters so P is small and R is negative. He concludes that voting is irrational. Riker and Ordeshook, p. 28-34 respond that P depends on the closeness of the election, not just the number of voters and also add D to the equation.

12 See Campbell et al., also Lazersfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1948)Google Scholar. Riker and Ordeshook p. 28 discuss the “sense of citizen duty.”

13 Critical elections and the realignments produced by them have been discussed, among others, by Key, Valdimer O., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, 17 (1955), 3–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell et al.; and Sundquist, James L., Dynamics of the Parly System. Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1973)Google Scholar.

14 Further discussion of these points can be found in Bailey, Martin J., “The Welfare Cost of Inflationary Finance,” Journal of Political Economy, 64 (04, 1956), 93–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 We made some efforts to see whether some other “national” issues had a significant effect on our results. We investigated the effect of war, the duration of war, the rate of change of farm prices and the rate of change of stock market prices, the latter as a possible indicator of future economic conditions. None of our preliminary results provided evidence that our measures of these events had a significant effect on congressional elections.

16 Our definition differs from Kramer's, , “Short-term Fluctuations,” p. 136 Google Scholar. He treats all minor party votes as votes against the incumbent on grounds that short-term fluctuations in voting express satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the performance of the incumbent. We believe this overstates the extent of change in public attitudes when there are changes in the party holding the presidency by shifting the average third party vote from one major party to the other.

17 The disturbances in the VD and VR equations are linear combinations of the four components of the error term in VP. Use of ordinary least-squares to estimate the coefficients of the VD and VR equations yields unbiased estimates that are not as asymptotically efficient as the generalized least-squares estimators of Zellner.

See Zellner, Arnold, “An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests for Aggregation Bias,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 57 (1962), 348-68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zellner, Arnold and Huang, David S., “Further Properties of Efficient Estimators for Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations,” International Economic Review, 3 (1962), 300–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Zellner, Arnold, “Estimators for Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations: Some Exact Finite Sample Results,” Journal of The American Statistical Association, 58 (12, 1963), 977-92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Flanigan, p. 42.

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