Do Voters Look to the Future?, livre ebook

Argues in favor of a different model of voting behavior.

Argues in favor of a different model of voting behavior.

Do voters look to the past, the future, or both when deciding how to vote? In Do Voters Look to the Future?, Brad Lockerbie shows voters to be more sophisticated than much of the work in political science would suggest. He argues that voters do not simply reward or punish the incumbent administration, but instead make a comparative evaluation of the likely performance of each candidate and vote for the one that will most likely provide them with a prosperous future. Making use of data from 1956 through the present, Lockerbie finds that voters take into account both what has happened and what they think will happen when they vote. He finds these economic evaluations to be strongly related to voting behavior both for the House and the Senate, as well as the presidency. Additionally, Lockerbie examines the role of these economic items to explain changes in party identification.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Simple Economic Relationships

Appendix 2.1: Prospective Evaluations: Are They Partisan Rationalization?

3. Party Identification: Is It Changeable?

Is It Explicable?
Appendix 3.1: Instrumental Variables for PIDt21 (3-Point and 7-Point Scales)
Appendix 3.2: Party Identification as a Function of Retrospective and Prospective Economic Evaluations with Actual Past Party Identification (3-Point and 7-Point Scales)
Appendix 3.3: Party Identification as a Function of Changes in Evaluations (3-Point and 7-Point Scales)

4. Presidential Elections: A More Comprehensive View

5. Congressional Elections: Yes, the Senate Too

6. Economics and Politics: Egocentric or Sociotropic?

Appendix 6.1: Retrospective Egocentric and Sociotropic Items Predicting Political Attitudes: 1992
Appendix 6.2: Retrospective Egocentric, Sociotropic, and Prospective Items Predicting Political
Attitudes: 1992
Appendix 6.3: Retrospective Egocentric, Sociotropic, and Prospective Economic Evaluations, Ideology, and Party Identification Predicting Political
Attitudes: 1992

7. Forecasting Elections

Appendix 7.1: Data and Sources of Data

8. Concluding Remarks

Notes
References
Index
Illustrations
Tables