Sociotropic Voting Last time: Retrospective voting Sociotropic voting

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?

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

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 can’t easily counteract policy-oriented actions (constituency service, position-taking, distributive/redistributive policies, etc.)

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

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