The Effect of Economic Events on Votes for President

Abstract

InttwIttctionN important question in political economy A.' ts how, if at all, economic events affect voting behavior.Although there is by now a fairly large literature devoted to this question,' there is no widely agreed upon answer.Kramer (1971), for example, concluded from his analysis of U.S. voting behavior that economic fluctuations have an important influence on congressional elections, whereas Stigler (1973) concluded that they do not.This debate'has been continued by Arcelus and Meltzer (1975a, b), Bloom and Price (1975), and Goodman and Kramer (1975)?Many of the disagreements in this area are over statistical procedures and the interpretation of empirical results, but it is also clear that there is no single theory of voting behavior to which everyone subscribes.Unfortunately, the distinction between theoretical and empirical disagreements in this literature is often not very sharp, and there has been no systematic testing of one theory against another.This paper has two main purposes.The first is to present a model of voting behavior that is general enough to incorporate what appear to be most of the theories of voting behavior in the recent literature and that allows one to test