IS
THE ECONOMY STUPID
Since
James Carville famously wrote "The
Economy, Stupid"
in Bill Clinton's campaign headquarters, the mass public has become
increasingly familiar with what is one of the more important "facts"
discovered by political scientists: US presidential elections are
undoubtedly affected by the state of the economy.
The
question of which part
of the economy matters most, however, still remains unsolved. Nate
Silver has two very interesting recent posts on this topic. In
one,
he makes the claim that the key figure is 150,000 jobs per month: if
the US economy performs better than that between now and the
elections, Obama has a good chance of being elected.In
the second,
he subjects a whole host (43 to be precise) of different economic
variables to the test of predicting 16 different US presidential
election results, and then compares which of these variables performs
best; again his payroll job growth variable does quite well. Also
recently, The Monkey Cage's Larry Bartels, also writing in
the New
York Times,
highlights changes in real disposable income (which comes in tenth on
Silver's list), a long time favourite variable of political
scientists studying US politics.
Both
posts are worth reading, as they continue to provide irrefutable
evidence of a link between economic conditions and election results
in the US. Moreover, the question of which economic conditions matter
most is of both academic and pragmatic interest. Whether it is
actually possible to study this in an empirically satisfying matter
when limiting oneself to US presidential elections, however, remains
an open question. As Silver
notes:
"When you're testing 43 different economic indicators over a sample of just 16 elections, the best-performing ones are likely to have been a little lucky. In fact, the relative rank of the economic indicators has historically been very inconsistent: those that perform best over one set of elections do not do much better over the long-term."
In my
book on
economic voting in post-communist countries in the 1990s, I took a
slightly different tack. Rather than try to parse out the effect of
different economic variables on election results, I used the best
data I had available to try to get a general estimate of how parties
would perform when the economic environment was "good" as
opposed to "bad". Now I was doing something quite different
- trying to use regional variation in economic conditions to predict
regional variation in election results one election at a time - but
at the end of the day I wonder how much more we can really claim with
16 elections to draw on in the US beyond the (very valuable)
observation that better economic conditions help the incumbent, while
worse economic conditions hurt the incumbent.
As
Silver aptly notes, a variable that does well through 13 elections
can suddenly perform poorly in the 14th, and then where are we? Most
obviously, I think this probably follows from the fact that an awful
lot of Silver's 43 variables co-vary with one another. If his results
showed three variables with huge effects and then 40 with no
effect, I would think we were on to something quite important.
Instead, however, we see a gradual decline across all the variables,
suggesting to me at least that after four more presidential
elections we might still see the same gradual decline, but with a
reordering of the rankings.
Indeed,
the most interesting thing from Silver's horse race type of analysis
is probably the variables that have norelationship
with vote outcomes. And while these may also be the result of random
noise, there is one that is worth mentioning, which is unemployment.
I
have always been struck by the lack of unemployment measures in most
of these US economic voting models, and Silver suggests why this is
the case: in his data at least, unemployment has no effect on
election results in US presidential elections (as a side note, while
I used a variety of variables in my models in post-communist
countries, unemployment is an - if not the most - important driver of
the results). Silver does, however, find a very strong effect for
change in unemployment between January-September of the election
year, which actually overlaps very nicely with Bartels' basic claim
in his piece that voters are myopic, heavily weighting recent
economic developments at the expense of economic developments from
earlier in one's term.
So
once again, we may be in a situation where economic variables co-vary
with one another (we would expect growth in real disposable income to
go up as unemployment comes down), but we can make some interesting
observations about the time-frame within which the economy matters.
Joshua
A. Tucker is a Professor of Politics at New York University, a
National Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and
a co-author of the award winning politics and policy
blog The
Monkey Cage,
where an earlier
version of
this article was posted.
Follow
him on Twitter: @j_a_tucker
.
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