Economy Not Always Key Factor in Voter Choice

How much does the economy influence an election? Well, that might depend.

So say Randy Stevenson, the Albert Thomas Associate Professor of Political Science at Rice, and Raymond Duch, the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston, who have created a model that can predict when the economy is likely to be an important issue in an election.

The researchers studied 165 election surveys conducted in 17 countries between 1980 and 2002 to monitor the conditions in which the economy impacted voters’ choices. “Using the assumption that people vote because they want to change future outcomes,” Stevenson says, “we worked out three factors that make the economy more or less important to an election.”

The first factor involves distribution of the government’s administrative responsibility or distribution of power across political parties. “The more concentrated the distribution of responsibility for economic management is in a single party, the more important the economy will be in an election,” Stevenson says. He notes that in countries like Italy, where the governing system has a number of parties that share executive responsibility, voters cannot change economic policy by putting one party in and taking another out.

The second factor—the distribution of cabinet contention—depends on a competitive race for executive power. “In the United States, there’s always a competitive race, but in some other democracies, there’s a negotiation for who’s going to control the executive power after the election,” Stevenson says. “Under those circumstances, they don’t bother voting over the economy because the election is unlikely to change the distribution of power.”

The third factor is a little trickier to discern, Stevenson says. It entails how voters interpret the ups and downs inherent in most economies. If the economy provides a strong signal about the competency of the person in office, the voter is apt to place importance on the state of the economy when casting a vote. Most voters realize the economy normally fluctuates, and they have to decide whether a particular shift in the economy is due to the actions of politicians. They can make that decision more intelligently if they have a sense of how variable a country’s economy is in general and how vulnerable a country’s economy is to activity elsewhere in the world. “Voters who know that they’re in a very insulated economy that is buffered from fluctuations in the world economy,” Stevenson explains, “are likely to conclude that variation in the domestic economy is due to domestic forces and policies.”

Using these three factors, the researchers found that the United Kingdom has the most economic voting, and Australia and New Zealand have quite a lot, too. These results were not surprising, Stevenson says, because these countries usually have had one strong, powerful party in control of the legislature, and elections are always competitive there. The United States often has economic voting because the elections almost always are competitive, the distribution of authority is clearly concentrated, and economic growth is less dependent on what happens in other parts of the world. When control of Congress and the presidency is split among parties, less economic voting occurs, Stevenson notes, but the factor that can vary the most over time is the signal the economy conveys about the competency of the politicians.

“American voters compare the U.S. to other countries, and people can conclude that the rest of the world is doing so badly that our politicians must be fairly competent to have kept our economy fairly good,” Stevenson says. But there’s a “fair difference of opinion” about whether the U.S. economy is better, worse, or the same as it was a year ago.
Unusual circumstances, such as the war in Iraq, can take precedence over the factors in Stevenson’s model. “As the importance of one thing goes up, such as foreign policy,” Stevenson says, “the importance of something else goes down.”

Stevenson and Duch hope to publish a book about their model sometime this year.

—B. J. Almond