partisan bias in economic news evidence on the agenda setting behavior of u s newspapers abstract we study the agenda setting political behavior of a large sample of u s newspapers during the 1996 2005 period our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president focusing on unemployment inflation the federal budget and the trade deficit we investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers and the differential coverage of bad good economic news as a function of the president s political affiliation we find evidence that newspapers with pro democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a republican than when the president is democratic compared to newspapers with pro republican endorsement pattern this result is robust to controlling for the partisanship of readers we find similar but less robust results for the trade deficit we also find some evidence that newspapers cater to the partisan tastes of readers in the coverage of the budget deficit we find no evidence of a partisan bias or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement or reader partisanship for stories on inflation

generalized models of japanese demand for fish given a relative lack of knowledge about japanese consumer preferences for fish japanese fish demand is modeled using both marshallian ordinary and inverse demand systems each of which nests a number of competing specifications results indicate that the inverse demand systems dominate the ordinary demand systems in forecasting performance and in nonnested tests the inverse system suggests that japanese fish prices are less responsive to changes in consumption than found in previous studies

a further look at flexibilities and elasticities relationships between price elasticities and price flexibilities are examined with emphasis on comparing sizes of difference between a directly estimated demand matrix and an inverted demand matrix results show that by using inverted elasticities to represent flexibilities or vice versa sizable measurement errors may be committed in agricultural policy and program analysis a directly estimated demand matrix should be used

a broken public americans responses to the great recession did americans respond to the recent great recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity an expectation of state of the art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion or did the recession erode support for government activism in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect we find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010 yet both fixed effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy attitude formation what accounts for these surprising developments we consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes analyzing the general social surveys panel our results suggest political partisanship has been central gallup and evaluations of government and society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government o

are developing countries really defying the embedded liberalism compact this study evaluates the embedded liberalism hypothesis in a broad swath of less developed countries ldc s the authors find that ldc governments pursue a distinct welfare state policy that protects citizens from economic insecurities associated with global market expansion specifically governments use public employment and particularly employment in civil services and administration to foster domestic stability alongside market expansion however such jobs are targeted to politically salient groups not poorer groups that might also face increased economic uncertainty postopenness in turn public employment shores up public support for openness the authors findings suggest that free traders have reasons both to celebrate and to bemoan this ldc embedded liberalism compact on the positive side ldc governments are working hard to maintain political support for free trade on the other hand the compromise of protecting privileged groups at the expense of others in society raises questions about the long term sustainability of their strategy

let the good times roll the economic expectations of u s voters increasingly the concept of expectation is utilized to explain political choices with voters being depicted as prospective rather than retrospective in their orientations this paper tests competing theories of economic expectations forecasts with data from consumer surveys 1960 91 forecasts of inflation confirm the hypothesis of adaptive expectations but forecasts of general economic conditions do not nor do those forecasts conform to rational expectations instead voter forecasts of economic conditions are prone to a significant asymmetry while good economic times tend to foster optimism in an adaptive fashion bad times do not similarly feed pessimism instead they trigger a reverse forecast we explore this remarkable behavior in the light of psychological economics

what moves policy sentiment in spite of the fact that political eras in the united states are widely and often ambiguously defined in terms of a general policy sentiment or mood political scientists have done little in the way of rigorous analysis regarding this subject i argue that shifts in domestic policy sentiment along a liberal conservative continuum may be understood in part as responses to changing economic expectations specifically expectations of a strong economy result in greater support for liberal domestic policies whereas anticipation of declining economic conditions pushes the national policy mood to the right using quarterly data for the period 1968 88 i present a multiple time series error correction model that lends considerable support to the hypothesis

substituting the end for the whole why voters respond primarily to the election year economy according to numerous studies the election year economy influences presidential election results far more than cumulative growth throughout the term here we describe a series of surveys and experiments that point to an intriguing explanation for this pattern that runs contrary to standard political science explanations but one that accords with a large psychological literature voters we find actually intend to judge presidents on cumulative growth however since that characteristic is not readily available to them voters inadvertently substitute election year performance because it is more easily accessible this end heuristic explanation for voters election year emphasis reflects a general tendency for people to simplify retrospective assessments by substituting conditions at the end for the whole the end heuristic explanation also suggests a remedy a way to align voters actions with their intentions providing people with the attribute they are seeking cumulative growth eliminates the election year emphasis

bread and peace voting in u s presidential elections a simple bread and peace model shows that aggregate votes forpresident in postwar elections were determined entirely byweighted average growth of real disposable personal income percapita during the incumbent party s term and the cumulativenumbers of american military personnel killed in action as aresult of u s intervention in the korean and vietnamese civilwars the model is subjected to robustness tests against twenty two variations in functional form inspired by the extensiveliterature on presidential voting not one of these variationsadds value to the bread and peace model or significantly perturbsits coefficients

partisan preferences electoral prospects and economic expectations research shows that economic expectations reflect partisan preferences those who support the current government tend to think the future will go well at least by comparison with those who oppose the government but there always is uncertainty surrounding the political future especially in the period before elections this article considers whether the uncertainty matters specifically it examines whether people s economic expectations are conditional on their own estimates of who will win the analysis relies on data from five election study panels in the united states and the united kingdom both majoritarian systems where the effects of partisan winning and losing are most likely the results imply that people in these countries do anticipate election outcomes that is economic expectations prior to elections reflect both the political present and future this tells us not only that expectations in these systems are substantially rational but that politics plays a much bigger role in our economic

expectations and preferences in british general elections t a te address two questions how do people form their expectations about the likely winner of the next general election and what are the links between expectations and votes using v v data collected by the gallup organization in great britain we find that the expectations formation process 1 has a significant inertia component but also a rapid adjustment to current information 2 reflects voters ability to translate economic expectations into political forecasts and 3 is time bounded possessing special characteristics immediately before and after a general election the analysis also confirms the existence of a small bandwagon effect whereby expectations that one party will win inflate that party s vote the ability of voters to make reasonable forecasts without being unduly influenced by their own preferences suggests that under normal circumstances voters are expressing real preferences and not simply following the crowd

unraveling the relationship between presidential approval and the economy a multidimensional semiparametric approach summary empirical studies analyzing the determinants of us presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships we employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semiparametric additive mixed models and allow for flexible functional forms and thus possible nonlinear effects for the economic determinants by controlling for the well known politically motivated covariables we find strong evidence for nonlinear and negative effects of unemployment inflation and government consumption on presidential approval additionally we present new results in favor of nonparametric trivariate interaction effects between the macroeconomic covariables copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

the vp function revisited a survey of the literature on vote and popularity functions after over 40 years nannestad and paldam public choice 79 213 245 1994 published herein an extremely influential review of the literature linking economics and elections what they called the vp functions in that work they offered a number of conclusions in proposition form about the state of the evidence in this field we present the key ones 16 in all and assess the extent to which they continue to hold in light of the new evidence about what has come to be known as economic voting as shall be shown nannestad and paldam were prescient in their early establishment of many of the principal results explaining how the economy moves the vote choice

the role of policy in energy transitions lessons from the energy liberalisation era the aim of this paper is to discuss the period of energy privatisation and liberalisation which began in the 1980s within its wider historical context the key issues are what has been learned from this recent period and how significant is it in the light of an energy transition to low carbon energy system by 2050 energy liberalisation has led to positive and globally widespread but modest efficiency gains but a lack of clearly visible direct benefits to households in many countries it has significantly improved the governance of monopoly utilities via independent regulators the prospects for competition and innovation and the quality of policy instruments for environmental emissions control through the emergence of trading mechanisms we conclude that it is not liberalisation per se that will determine the movement towards a low carbon energy transition but the willingness of societies to bear the cost which will be significant no matter what the extent of liberalisation

the public as thermostat dynamics of preferences for spending theory democratic accountability requires that the public be reasonably well informed about what policymakers actually do such a public would adjust its preferences for more or less policy in response to policy outputs themselves in effect the public would behave like a thermostat when the actual policy temperature differs from the preferred policy temperature the public would send a signal to adjust policy accordingly and once sufficiently adjusted the signal would stop hypotheses in domains where policy is clearly defined and salient to the public changes in the public s preferences for more policy activity are negatively related to changes in policy methods a thermostatic model of american public preferences for spending on defense and a set of five social programs is developed and then tested using time series regression analysis results changes in public preferences for more spending reflect changes in both the preferred levels of spending and spending decisions themselves most importantly changes in preferences are negatively related to spending decisions whereby the public adjusts its preferences for more spending downward upward when appropriations increase decrease thus consistent with the eastonian model policy outputs do feed back on public inputs at least in the defense spending domain and across a set of social spending domains

animal spirits the effect of economic expectations on economic output the public is characterized as able forecasters of future economic performance they engage in rational expectations empirical evidence exists to bolster the claim this article considers the possibility that the public does more than predict economic output they may engage in a self fulfilling prophecy where belief about the future economy translates into personal financial behaviour e g consumption and investment that actually drives economic performance after controlling for rational expectations with elite forecasts leading indicators and past economic performance it is shown that between 5 and one third of the variance in economic output can be explained by prospective economic sentiment this result has broad implications for electoral behaviour research

a new view of political accountability for economic performance most political support models imply that in evaluating economic performance voters use a standard that would provide poor predictions of the future and leave the economy vulnerable to manipulation by vote hungry politicians drawing on macroeconomic theory we develop a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies we find that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by models that assume voter naivete our analysis questions the wisdom of measures typically used to assess voter evaluation of economic performance in a variety of theoretical contexts the results also help to explain the absence of convincing evidence that governments exploit voter ignorance in manipulating the economy

granger causality and the time series analysis of political relationships political scientists have employed causal modeling techniques for quite some time in most cases however they have relied on methods of a static cross sectional variety time series methods have been disseminated and applied but these have not been expressly causal the problem of assessing the causal character or direction of political relationships over time has not been addressed granger 1969 has suggested a notion of causality that is applicable in longitudinal analysis the study and application of granger s idea of causation now is widespread in economics and business this discussion evaluates the usefulness of applying granger causality in the study of political relationships granger s definition of causality is introduced several popular procedures for assessing granger causality are reviewed and certain problems surrounding interpretation of those empirical tests are elucidated the virtues and pitfalls of granger causal analysis then are illustrated in an analysis of an important topic in international political economy and also in a reanalysis of a recent granger causal investigation of arms races

economic expectations and voting behavior in united states house and senate elections past individual level studies of economic voting 1 have incorrectly operationalized the model they employ by using past oriented rather than future oriented questions and 2 have failed to examine the level of economic voting in united states senate elections using the 1978 national election study we show that economic voting exists in senate but not house elections presumably due to the differences in electoral context even when economic voting occurs however there is no guarantee that the public will influence the direction of macroeconomic policy

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

presidential particularism and divide the dollar politics when inuencing the allocation of federal dollars across the country do presidents strictly pursue maximally ecient outcomes or do they systematically target dollars to politically inuential constituencies in a county level analysis of federal spending from 1984 to 2008 we nd that presidents are not universalistic but particularistic that is they reliably direct dollars to specic constituents to further their political goals as others have noted presidents target districts represented by their co partisans in congress in the pursuit of inuence visavis the legislature but we show that at much higher levels presidents target both counties within swing states and counties in core states that strongly supported the president in recent elections swing state particularism is especially salient during presidential reelection years and core partisan counties within swing states are most heavily rewarded rather than strictly pursuing visions of good public policy or pandering to the national median voter our results suggest that presidents systematically prioritize the needs of politically important constituents

the political and economic origins of consumer confidence economic conditions the story usually goes influence consumer confidence which in turn influences both political evaluations and votes but we have little sense of the origins of consumer confidence itself it is generally assumed that monthly reports of the nation s level of consumer confidence respond to objective economic conditions we argue that politics is important for understanding consumer sentiment beyond what we know from economic conditions specifically we demonstrate a direct effect of political evaluations of the president s management of the economy the party of the president extraordinary political events and monetary policy as well as an indirect effect of media coverage of the economy on consumer sentiment after controlling for economic conditions when news coverage is positive citizens give favorable evaluations leading to more positive sentiment our findings suggest that understanding the political economy requires an emphasis on the causal effect of politics as well as economics

political accountability and the room to maneuver a search for a causal chain many studies of the room to maneuver make no provision for popular evaluation of policy they assert rather than demonstrate popular satisfaction with policy choices and macroeconomic outcomes the authors present a framework that explicitly models channels for popular preferences to influence policies and outcomes results for economic policy making in britain do not support the room to maneuver thesis in the authors sample 1981 to 1997 the british government was responsive to changes in political evaluations and its policy choices effectively fed back into popular evaluations of government policy however this accountability mechanism worked outside the real economy shifts in popular evaluations induced changes in policy but had no impact on inflation and economic growth government capacity to shape macroeconomic outcomes was limited and popular influence over economic policy was ineffectual this form of accountability probably existed because british citizens had difficulty gauging the real impacts of their government s policies

a comparison of prospective and retrospective voting with heterogeneous politicians a long standing empirical literature has been concerned with determining whether voters vote prospectively or retrospectively despite this interest little is known about the consequences of one voting regime versus another this study addresses this deficiency we find that voter welfare can be greatly affected by the candidate selection technique employed by voters among other findings we show that electing the best candidate does not always maximize voter welfare furthermore myopic voting is sometimes superior to farsighted voting these findings have implications for interpretations of empirical studies of voter behavior

letting the good times roll a theory of voter inference and experimental evidence this paper examines inference and attribution in a simple and ubiquitous strategic situation a voter is faced with discerning whether a leader worked on his or her behalf after observing an informative but noisy signal about the leader s performance we characterize perfect bayesian equilibria quantal response equilibria qre and provide a simple model of a heuristic based approach referred to as strategic naivete within a wide class of such environments we also discuss experiments conducted to examine human behavior within such an environment while it is clear that the observed behavior is inconsistent with perfect bayesian equilibrium distinguishing between qre and strategic naivete will require further work we conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of probabilistic and or heuristic based attribution processes for electoral politics and political economy

the inverse almost ideal demand system abstract a new demand system related to the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer is developed and illustrated this inverse aids iaids retains all of the desirable theoretical properties of the aids model with the exception of consistent aggregation an empirical issue is whether a linear approximation will work as well for the iaids as it has for the aids model since quantities are not as highly correlated as prices an application to u s meat demand demonstrates that the linear approximation of the iaids is excellent which enhanced the ease and range of application

electoral rules and political selection theory and evidence from a field experiment in afghanistan voters commonly face a choice between competent candidates and those with policy preferences similar to their own this article explores how electoral rules such as district magnitude mediate this trade off and affect the composition of representative bodies and the quality of policy outcomes we show formally that anticipation of bargaining over policy causes voters in elections with multiple single member districts to prefer candidates with polarized policy positions over more competent candidates results from a unique field experiment in afghanistan are consistent with these predictions specifically representatives selected by elections with a single multi member district are better educated and exhibit less extreme policy preferences

flexible specification of mixed demand systems common flexible functional forms are not very useful for modeling mixed demand systems because derivation of mixed demands requires closed forms for both direct and indirect utility functions in this paper we study the alternative of using a direct approximation to mixed demands we develop a new approach to slutsky relations for mixed demand functions allowing formulation of a rotterdam mixed demand model the resulting mixed demand system is illustrated with an application to meat demand in canada

peasants or bankers the american electorate and the u s economy t he usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the retrospective economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience voter as peasant a second model assumes a sophisticated economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations voter as banker using the components both retrospective and prospective of the index of consumer sentiment ics as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series with aggregate consumer expectations about long term business conditions in the approval equation neither the usual economic indicators not the other ics components matter moreover short term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy the qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen economics moves political behavior with hard times administrations lose support with good times they gain it we know this to be true but when we ask how by what processes the political translation of economic experience occurs the an

the personal and political underpinnings of economic forecasts recently a great deal of attention has been focused on the impact of prospective evaluations of the economy on vote choice yet little attention has been focused on the actual process whereby such evaluations are formed this paper employs panel data to test a model of the formation of prospective evaluations of inflation and unemployment our findings indicate that retrospective assessments of economic conditions do not greatly influence economic forecasts instead economic forecasts are shaped by personal economic circumstances and partisan assessments of governmental performance the political implications of such findings are discussed

it s all bad news voters perception of macroeconomic policy competence the purpose of the present paper is to consider how voters form perceptions about macroeconomic policy competence by focusing on the role of recent macroeconomic news do their perceived views of good news matter as much as bad news when they form beliefs about the incumbent government s competence in managing the macroeconomy in particular with regard to their ability to control inflation and unemployment we find that bad news about unemployment persists when households are forming their perceived competence whereas good news does not that is voters tend to display pessimistic bias when forming perceptions about the incumbent government s competence

the dynamics of public support for coalition governments this article investigates the relationship between economic conditions and party support for coalition parties in denmark and the netherlands the article argues that the simple reward punishment model cannot fully account for changes in citizens support for parties given variable economic performance using aggregate public support data for political parties the article shows that citizens differentiate between coalition partners depending on the parties issue priorities instead of blaming or rewarding all coalition parties in a uniform fashion citizens shift support from one coalition party to another depending on the perceived competence of a party to deal with particular economic problems the article finds that the structure of responsibility in parliamentary democracies ruled by coalition governments is more complex than is often assumed therefore it is argued that students of economics and public opinion should pay particular attention to the institutional context in which citizens make ch

principle vs pragmatism policy shifts and political competition this article investigates the electoral effect of party policy shifts i argue that whether party policy shifts are damaging or rewarding depends on whether the shift occurs in the pragmatic or principled issue domain on pragmatic issues voters value getting things done policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded principled issues however concern core beliefs and values any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal these arguments are supported by evidence from 23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years

the dynamics of the partisan gender gap genderdifferencesinvotechoice opinion andpartyidentificationhavebecomeacommonfeature of the american political landscape we examine the nature and causes of gender differences in partisanship using a time series approach we show that gender differences are pervasive existing outside of the context of specific elections or issues and that they are a product of the interaction ofsocietalconditionsandpolitics wefindthatfrom1979to2000 thepartisangendergaphasgrownwhen the political climate moved in a conservative direction the economy deteriorated and the percentage of economically vulnerable single women increased the gender gap is likely to be a continual feature of the american political landscape one that shapes everything from elite political behavior to election outcomes t he partisan preferences of men and women have both converged and diverged at different times in history the late 1970s for example saw a period in which men and women shared similar levels of democratic and republican partisan support since the early 1980s however partisan preferences have diverged the divergences are fundamentally political oftendecidingelectionoutcomes helpingstructure policy debates and election campaigns and also contributing to policy outcomes each of these may in turn either fuel or diminish the original differences in the partisanship of men and women and lead to a politics more or less divided on the basis of gender politicians for example may be well served by reaching out and supporting issues designed to minimize differences in support from men and women especially when the parties find themselves in rough parity electoral motivations may also lead politicians to support policy that exacerbatesgenderdifferenceswhengapsworkintheir favor further contributing to them to the extent that partisandifferencesacrossgendersarepersistent these implications become more profound characterizing thepoliticallandscapeforlongperiodsoftime convergence in the partisan preferences of men and women

dynamic conditional correlations in political science time varying relationships and volatility are two methodological challenges that are particular to the field of time series in the case of the former more comprehensive understanding can emerge when we ask under what circumstances relationships may change the impact of context such as the political environment the state of the economy the international situation etc is often missing in dynamic analyses that estimate time invariant parameters in addition time varying volatility presents a number of challenges including threats to inference if left unchecked among time varying parameter models the dynamic conditional correlation dcc model is a creative and useful approach that deals effectively with over time variation in both the mean and variance of time series the dcc model allows us to study the evolution of relationships over time in a multivariate setting by relaxing model assumptions and offers researchers a chance to reinvigorate understandings that are tested using time series data we demonstrate the method s potential in the first example by showing how the importance of subjective evaluations of the economy are not constant but vary considerably over time as predictors of presidential approval a second example using international dyadic time series data shows that the story of movement and comovement is incomplete without an understanding of the dynamics of their variance as well as their means

partisanship and economic behavior do partisan differences in economic forecasts predict real economic behavior survey data regularly show that assessments of current and expected future economic performance are more positive when a respondent s partisanship matches that of the president to determine if this is a survey artifact or something deeper we investigate whether partisanship is associated with behavioral differences in economic decisions we construct a new data set of county level quarterly taxable sales to examine the effect of partisanship on consumption consumption change following a presidential election is correlated with a county s partisan complexion a result consistent with partisans acting outside the domain of politics in accordance with the opinions they express in surveys these results support an expansive view of the role of partisanship in mass politics and help validate surveys as a method for studying political behavior

the logic of strategic defection court executive relations in argentina under dictatorship and democracy building on the separation of powers approach in american politics this article develops a new micro level account of judicial decision making in contexts where judges face institutional insecurity against conventional wisdom i argue that under certain conditions the lack of judicial independence motivates judges to strategically defect against the government once it begins losing power the result is a reverse legal political cycle in which antigovernment decisions cluster at the end of weak governments original data on more than 7 500 individual decisions by argentine supreme court justices 1976 1995 are used to test hypotheses about why when and in which types of cases judges are likely to engage in strategic defection consistent with the theory s predictions the results of the analysis show a significant increase in antigovernment decisions occurring at the end of weak dictatorships and weak democratic governments examining subsets of decisions and controlling for several additional variables further corroborate the strategic account

model choice in consumer analysis taiwan 1970 89 expenditure data were used to study how income and prices influenced consumer demand in taiwan during the last decade alternative differential demand models combining the features of the rotterdam model and the almost ideal demand system aids were tested aids type demand responses describe taiwanese consumer behavior better than do the other specifications

performance still matters explaining trust in government in the dominican republic what explains low levels of trust in government institutions in democratizing latin american countries the authors examine this question in the dominican republic employing data from three surveys conducted over 1994 to 2001 their analysis finds that trust in government institutions is shaped primarily by perceptions of economic and political performance by government there is little evidence of a relationship between civic engagement and institutional trust and no relationship between democratic values and institutional trust they find a curvilinear effect between socioeconomic status and institutional trust with middle sector groups significantly less trusting of government institutions than either the poor or the wealthy age has a nonlinear effect as older generations who experienced authoritarianism as children are considerably more trusting of democratic institutions contradicting predictions by culturalist early life socialization arguments the authors conclude that low trust per se is n

good news and bad news evidence of media bias in unemployment reports this study employs information obtained from media content analyses as well as economic and political data to investigate negativity in unemployment news between 2001 and 2010 in germany the data indicate a substantial bias in terms of the amounts of negative and positive reports compared with the actual development of unemployment moreover the media tend to place negative unemployment reports more prominently than positive ones the estimates suggest that the bias is not the consequence of journalists asymmetrically interpreting the official unemployment numbers instead it is associated with the exploitation of often non economic information and structural influences in the process of news production

testing restrictions on a model of japanese meat demand tests for quasi separability net substitutability and perfect substitutability are developed and implemented on an almost ideal demand system model of the japanese meat sector the data set satisfies both symmetry and homogeneity there is evidence of net complimentarity between chicken and dairy beef and chicken and pork the tests indicate that japanese wagyu beef is considered a separate commodity to both imported beef and dairy beef the results also indicate that fish can be treated as separable in the japanese meat demand system

heterogeneity in perceptions of national economic conditions empirical findings concerning economic voting differ according to the level of analysis employed a widely accepted explanation for the inconsistency between macroand microlevel evidence of economic voting is the high degree of random variation that plagues survey data according to this explanation aggregation purges individual level noise from mass opinions on policy issues and outcomes building on the research of bartels 1996 we debate the validity of this explanation by demonstrating that public evaluations of the national economy vary systematically with information media exposure political attitudes personal experiences and demographic characteristics furthermore we show that these sources of subjective heterogeneity produce systematic biases when national economic evaluations are aggregated these findings challenge a widely accepted notion that because error in individual level measures or expressions of preferences is random the aggregation of these individual measures ensures that they correctly represent the collective preference mpirical findings concerning the influence of the economy on political behavior differ depending on the level of analysis employed using aggregate level data numerous studies have established a statistical relationship between economic conditions and election outcomes or executive popularity e g kramer 1971 mackuen erikson and stimson 1992 on the basis of the macro level evidence alone one would have little reason to doubt that the economy matters in contrast individual level studies using survey data have produced only mixed evidence that voters consider economic conditions when evaluating the incumbent government and its leaders e g fiorina 1978 1981 kinder and kiewiet 1979 1981 moreover the strongest survey evidence of economic voting suggests that voters primarily care about national economic conditions not their personal financial situation this finding contradicts the egocentric theory posited by early macro level research that national economic indicators matter because they are correlated with personal financial circumstances the micro macro dichotomy in economic voting research reflects a similar dichotomy in research on voter sophistication and representation aggregate level studies tend to indicate that voters are reasonably well informed about the economy and make forward looking rather sophisticated voting decisions e g alesina londregan and rosenthal 1993 suzuki and chappell 1996 palmer and whitten 1999 these studies infer that mass political decisions conform to rational expectations or at least limited information rationality e g mackuen erikson and stimson 1992 in contrast to this macro level image of the voter individual level survey research has shown that the public in general has low levels of political sophistication lacking much knowledge of and interest in politics e g

partisan cycles in congressional elections and the macroeconomy in the postwar united states the president s party has always done worse in the midterm congressional elections than in the previous congressional election republican administrations exhibit below average and democratic administrations above average economic growth in the first half of each term whereas in the latter halves the two see equal growth our rational expectations model is consistent with these two regularities in presidential elections voters choose between two polarized candidates they then use midterm elections to counterbalance the president s policies by strengthening the opposition in congress since presidents of different parties are associated with different policies our model predicts a spurious correlation between the state of the economy and elections our predictions contrast with those of retrospective voting models in which voters reward the incumbent if the economy is doing well before the election our model performs empirically at least as well as and often better than alternative models

social policy responsiveness in developed democracies do mass policy preferences influence the policy output of welfare states in developed democracies this is an important issue for welfare state theory and research and this article presents an analysis that builds from analytical innovations developed in the emerging literature on linkages between mass opinion and public policy the authors analyze a new dataset combining a measure of social policy preferences with data on welfare state spending alongside controls for established causal factors behind social policy making the analysis provides evidence that policy preferences exert a significant influence over welfare state output guided also by statistical tests for endogeneity the authors find that cross national differences in the level of policy preferences help to account for a portion of the differences among social christian and liberal welfare state regimes the results have implications for developing fruitful connections between welfare state scholarship comparative opinion research and recent opinion policy studies

believing in economic theories sex lies evidence trust and ideology i introduction beliefs about the descriptive validity of economic theories may influence preferences among economic policies if so these beliefs may shape and constrain economic institutions and policies in democracies we examine how beliefs about the descriptive validity of supply and demand theory respond to evidence and how these beliefs are related to individual attitudes and demographic characteristics with a strong focus on the potential role played by ideology political economists usually view heterogeneity of policy preferences as mostly reflecting heterogeneity of values interests or goals a large interdisciplinary debate continues about the relative importance of diverse self interests and public spirited goals in explaining political outcomes but the potential role played by diversity of positive beliefs has received relatively little attention preferences under uncertainty are typically decomposed into values utilities of outcomes and beliefs about the likelihoods of outcomes suggesting that heterogeneity of policy preferences may derive as much from differences in beliefs about how the economic world functions as from differences in interests such descriptive beliefs frequently differ sharply from those of economists slembeck 2003 for instance blendon et al 1997 reported that only 28 of the us public think price increases are mainly due to the laws of supply and demand and nearly three fourths of the public believed that the increase in gasoline prices in 1996 was due more to the oil companies trying to increase profits than to supply and demand while 85 of economists believed that supply and demand explained the price increase the recurring significance of ideology or proxies for it in empirical studies of political outcomes provides one reason to take this idea seriously rubin 2001 concluded that while electoral constraints based on voter interests limit politicians behavior factors measuring ideology have large power in explaining congressional voting ideology could reflect self interest but other explanations are possible from the perspective of bounded rationality people might use ideology heuristically to evaluate descriptive claims when evidence is scant or hard to evaluate from a game theoretic perspective people may regard descriptive claims made by others with ideologies different from their own as manipulation attempts and hence may discount them particularly in the long run causality may run the other way around revisions of descriptive beliefs about the workings of the economic world may bring about changes in ideology we address some of these matters below and discuss others in our conclusions romer 2003 p 29 offered a theoretical account of how diverse but correlated beliefs can lead to inefficient policy outcomes even when interests do not vary and concluded that t he research program suggested by this paper is that of bringing ideology back into the analysis of politics there may be a great deal to be learned if we do not presume that ideology is just a mask for individuals well informed pursuit of their self interest but instead consider the possibility that it often reflects individuals beliefs and that these beliefs often influence their actions our results here provide some evidence supporting this view we understand of course that the student respondents we examine in this study are a narrowly selected subset of any polity 1 bearing this in mind perhaps it is best to view our work as illustrating an approach to exploring the relationship between ideology and descriptive belief still more broadly we freely combine econometric and experimental methods of economics with survey measurement tools borrowed from political and social psychology our work here may also be regarded as an applied introduction to some of the latter tools

democratic accountability and retrospective voting a laboratory experiment understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior i conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning if voters are forward looking but uncertain about politicians unobservable characteristics then it is rational to focus on selection but doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat in contrast to rational choice predictions the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and in addition suggest that voters have a preference for accountability the results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

learning dynamics and support for economic reforms why good news can be bad support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics many reforms that began successfully lost public support this paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement this concept challenges the conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing reform winners it may also lead to situations in which reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support will still not come to completion the framework can be used to explain why gradual reforms worked well in china where successes in special economic zones facilitated further reform whereas this was much less the case for latin american and central and eastern european countries

unsuccessful success failed no confidence motions competence signals and electoral support if no confidence motions are primarily motivated by bringing down governments why do only approximately 5 of no confidence motions in advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 result in the termination of government in this project the author addresses this puzzle by developing a formal model of the electoral benefits of no confidence motions and tests these hypotheses with the use of an original data set no confidence motions represent highly visible opportunities for opposition parties to highlight their strength or ability compared to the government in the hopes of improving their vote shares the author finds support for the signal based theory on a sample of 20 advanced parliamentary democracies from 1960 to 2008 although no confidence motions result in decreases for the government parties the opposition parties that propose the motion experience boosts in vote share this relationship is even stronger when the proposing party is an alternative governing possibility illustrated by the condit

dynamic responsiveness in the u s senate id evelop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate moreover the size of past victories matters close elections yield little change but landslides yield large rc hanges in the candidates offered by both parties i test this theory by analyzing the relationship between republican vote share in u s senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election the results show that republican democratic victories in past elections yield candidates wh oa re more less conservative in subsequent elections and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory this suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns one major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter

selection vs accountability an experimental investigation of campaign promises in a moral hazard environment abstract we examine retrospective and prospective voting considerations in an experiment implementing a simple voting model in each period the official chooses how much rent to appropriate from a social endowment announcement of this choice is followed by an election between the official and a randomly selected challenger with the winner becoming the official in the next period we vary two features of the setting a the discount factor and b whether candidates can make costless non binding campaign promises about their behaviour if elected consistent with the model s predictions both raising the discount factor and introducing campaign promises lead to lower rent appropriation by officials and worse electoral outcomes other things equal for incumbents campaign promises despite being cheap talk have real effects promising less appropriation is rewarded by voters but breaking such promises is punished finally we find a weak positive association between campaign promises and officials subsequent behaviour

political choice public policy and distributional outcomes i address the functioning of the u s governing system by analyzing distributional outcomes from 1947 to 2000 the key question is whether public policy influences distributional outcomes the macropolitics model and power resource theory suggest that left policies should equalize the distribution of income i utilize single equation error correction models to assess the impact of policy on income inequality through two mechanisms market conditioning and redistribution since nearly every government action influences markets in some way i examine policy in the aggregate rather than focusing only on policies explicitly designed to redistribute income the analysis indicates that policy influences inequality through both mechanisms with left policy producing more equality the results are consistent with power resource theory and strongly support the macropolitics model furthermore i find that market conditioning is as important as and works in tandem with explicit redistribution

sources of bias in retrospective decision making experimental evidence on voters limitations in controlling incumbents are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance however these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world in this article we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games in three experiments our participants 1 overweighted recent relative to overall incumbent performance when made aware of an election closer rather than more distant from that event 2 allowed an unrelated lottery that affected their welfare to influence their choices and 3 were influenced by rhetoric to give more weight to recent rather than overall incumbent performance these biases were apparent even though we informed and incentivized respondents to weight all performance equally our findings point to key limitations in voters ability to use a retrospective decision rule

trajectories of fear and hope support for democracy in post communist europe prospects for the successful consolidation of democracy in post communist europe hinge substantially on the trajectory and determinants of popular support surveys in bulgaria czechoslovakia hung

the silence of the lambdas a test of the almost ideal and rotterdam models during the past decade the linear approximate la almost ideal demand system and the rotterdam model have been adopted by agricultural economists as the demand systems of choice in most applications the apparent explanation is that the two models are both second order locally flexible and compatible with demand theory they have identical data requirements and are equally parsimonious with respect to parameters and both are linear in the parameters while the two models are thus equally attractive in most respects and indeed appear very similar in structure they lead to different results in some applications this article develops a test of each against the other in an illustrative application to u s meat demand the almost ideal model is rejected while the rotterdam model is not

representation in municipal government municipal governments play a vital role in american democracy as well as in governments around the world despite this little is known about the degree to which cities are responsive to the views of their citizens in the past the unavailability of data on the policy preferences of citizens at the municipal level has limited scholars ability to study the responsiveness of municipal government we overcome this problem by using recent advances in opinion estimation to measure the mean policy conservatism in every u s city and town with a population above 20 000 people despite the supposition in the literature that municipal politics are non ideological we find that the policies enacted by cities across a range of policy areas correspond with the liberal conservative positions of their citizens on national policy issues in addition we consider the influence of institutions such as the presence of an elected mayor the popular initiative partisan elections term limits and at large elections our results show that these institutions have little consistent impact on policy responsiveness in municipal government these results demonstrate a robust role for citizen policy preferences in determining municipal policy outcomes but cast doubt on the hypothesis that simple institutional reforms enhance responsiveness in municipal governments