Mark Schmitt writes:
The long election cycle featured as many theories about how the election would turn out as there were presidential candidates in those first debates in 2007. Let’s give some of the theories a post-final-exam assessment.
He discusses a bunch of things here, but the one that interests me the most is:
Economic Determinism: B.
Some political scientists and economists like to remind us that for all the Palin jokes and PUMAs and debate gaffes, elections are pretty simple—a good economy benefits the party in power; a bad economy creates a change election. There are various models that, ignoring all polls, aggregate and weight economic data to predict the outcome. The best known model is that of Yale’s Ray Fair, which predicted an Obama victory with 51.9 percent of the vote, off by just a percentage point. Other models were also accurate.
My comment: Regarding the political science theories, I think “economic determinism” is a bit strong. These models do have other predictors and they also acknowledge error. Also, I know that Ray Fair did this stuff early on, but nowadays I think that political scientists such as Bob Erikson, Chris Wlezien, Doug Hibbs, Jim Campbell, and Larry Bartels are the more serious researchers in this area. If you want to read a whole book about the topic, I recommend Steven Rosenstone’s Forecasting Presidential Elections from 1983. “Economic determinism” may look kind of simplistic, but I think the work of Rosenstone and his successors captures important truths.
{ 1 comment }
I’m actually quite partial to Abramowitz’s model, myself.
“Economic determinism” is a BIT strong, but only a bit. The economy predicts seat gain/loss in Congress VERY well, less so presidential vote share. However, I like Abramowitz’s model because I think Reagan’s quote is really the one that explains elections: “are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?” And people ask that question holistically.
Some of the error, of course, might not be giving up on determinism! For example, this year, 2nd quarter GDP growth (a common metric of the state of the economy) was kinda good. It was just the stimulus bill, though. So, we can still be determinists if we admit that our measures are imperfect!
That said, nobody uses only the economy to make a prediction, and fewer still make the argument that it is directly causal.
Comments on this entry are closed.