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The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables on Congressional Elections
Abstract
This paper uses rational voting behavior as an organizing device to develop a framework within which to consider the effect of economic aggregates on voters. Unlike most previous studies, ours permits the voter to vote for candidates of either party or to abstain. A principal finding is that the effect of the main economic aggregates on the participation rate is much clearer than the effects on either party. Our results deny that an incumbent administration can affect the control of Congress by stimulating the economy. Voters appear to make judgments about inflation, unemployment and economic growth. We investigated on the basis of long-term, not short-term performance.
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Citations
Cited by
The Effect of Economic Events on Votes for President
Fair, R. C. (1978) · The Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.2307/1924969 · Cited by 964
Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout
Charles, K. K., & Stephens, M. (2013) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.5.4.111 · Cited by 93
Metadata
- Authors
- Arcelus, F., & Meltzer, A. H.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1975-12
- Volume
- 69
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1232-1239
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2109800312
- Cited by
- 226
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 99.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Arcelus, F., & Meltzer, A. H. (1975). The Effect of Aggregate Economic Variables on Congressional Elections. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1955283
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
