Measuring Change in Personal Economic Well-Being

Individual-level investigations of the link between personal economic wellbeing and political preference commonly turn up findings at odds with aggregate, overtime analyses. Although various theoretical explanations for this anomaly have been advanced, we focus on a different culprit: the possibly frail measure employed in survey based studies. We develop improved measures of change in personal economic wellbeing and use a national survey of the American electorate to test them. Our findings are striking: although the traditional question used by survey researchers is quite valid, its unreliability has caused the effect of personal economic well-being on political evaluations to be substantially underestimated. Steven J. Rosenstone is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. John Mark Hansen is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The University of Chicago and is a Research Fellow at The Brookings Institution. Donald R. Kinder is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Associate Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research, both at the University of Michigan. 1 E.g., Kramer, 1971; Bloom and Price, 1975; Frey and Schneider, 1975; Tufte, 1978; Kernell, 1978; Hibbs and Fassbinder, 1981; Hibbs, 1982; and Rosenstone, 1983. 2E.g. , Fiorina, 1978, 1981; Kinder and Kiewiet, 1979, 1981; Schlozman and Verba, 1979; Sears et al., 1980; Kinder, 1981; Kiewiet, 1983. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 50.176-192 ? 1986 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press 0033-362X/86/0050-176/$2.50 This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:20:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms MEASURING CHANGE IN PERSONAL ECONOMIC WELL-BEING 177 predicaments of groups (Conover, 1985; Kinder et al., 1983). Perhaps personal finances have political consequences, but only for rather unusual voters (Feldman, 1982; Kinder and Mebane, 1983). Or perhaps the political effect of family finances has to do not with the voter's calculus but with the caliber of candidates: the appearance of attractive, well-financed out-party candidates hoping to reap windfalls from the incumbents' economic woes (Fiorina, 1978; Jacobson and Kernell, 1981). 3 We take a different route. We argue here that the frail results produced by survey-based analyses reflect in part the frail measurement of changing personal economic well-being. While relatively trustworthy measures of aggregate economic conditions are readily available, the reliability and validity of individual-level measures of personal financial security are largely untested. Most survey work, in fact, has depended on answers to a single question asked (with slight variation) by the National Elections Studies since 1952: We are interested in how people are getting along financially these days. Would you say that you (and your family living with you) are better off or worse off than you were a year ago? Pinpointing the connection between economic circumstance and political preference based on this lone item is a perilous enterprise.4 Motivated by the theoretical issues at stake, we report here our efforts to improve the measurement of change in personal economic well-being. We attend to two kinds of measurement error: those arising from use of a single item rather than a set, and those deriving from use of a time frame (one year) that may be beyond respondents' memories. We draw upon a national survey conducted in the summer of 1983 to assess the adequacy of the traditional better/worse off question and compare its performance to new items we designed. While our results have immediate implications for the proper measurement of personal economic well-being, they also hold lessons for the measurement of subjective states more generally and for our understanding of the interplay between economics and politics in the lives of ordinary citizens. 3 Kramer (1983), in addition, has argued that individual-level findings are statistical artifacts and that the mechanisms linking economic conditions to politics can never be uncovered using cross-sectional data. 4 The better/worse off financially question is sometimes supplemented by others: by measures of unemployment and underemployment (e.g., Fiorina, 1981; Kinder and Kiewiet, 1979), by questions that invite citizens to name their most pressing personal problems, which are often economic (e.g., Kinder and Kiewiet, 1981; Kiewiet, 1983), and in at least two instances by sets of questions that attempt to map personal economic experiences and judgments more comprehensively (Kinder and Mebane, 1983; Mebane, 1982). This content downloaded from 207.46. 13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:20:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor. org/terms 178 STEVEN J. ROSENSTONE, JOHN MARK HANSEN AND DONALD R. KINDER Measuring Change in Personal Economic Well-Being