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Hurricane Irene: More Bad News for Obama (and House Republicans??)

- August 27, 2011

Photo by Joshua A. Tucker

In honor of “Hurricane Irene”:http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/08/27/tropical.weather/index.html?iref=BN1&hpt=hp_t1, I thought I would post a link to the classic “Bartels”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bartels and “Achen”:http://wws.princeton.edu/people/display_person.xml?netid=achen&all=yes work on “voter responses to acts of God”:http://www.march.es/ceacs/publicaciones/working/archivos/2004_199.pdf before the power goes out. Bottom line: voters are willing to blame incumbents for just about anything, including things beyond the control of government like the weather. Here’s the abstract of “Juan March Foundation”:http://www.march.es/ “Working Paper Series”:http://www.march.es/ceacs/ingles/publicaciones/ version of the paper:

Students of democratic politics have long believed that voters punish incumbents for hard times. Governments bear the responsibility for the economy in the modern era, so that replacing incompetent managers with capable alternatives appears to be a well-informed, rational act. However, this vision of a sophisticated retrospective electorate does not bear close examination. We find that voters regularly punish governments for acts of God, including droughts, floods, and shark attacks. As long as responsibility for the event itself (or more commonly, for its amelioration) can somehow be attributed to the government in a story persuasive within the folk culture, the electorate will take out its frustrations on the incumbents and vote for out-parties. Thus, voters in pain are not necessarily irrational, but they are ignorant about both science and politics, and that makes them gullible when ambitious demagogues seek to profit from their misery. Neither conventional understandings of democratic responsiveness nor rational choice interpretations of retrospective voting survive under this interpretation of voting behavior.

The full paper is available “here”:http://www.march.es/ceacs/publicaciones/working/archivos/2004_199.pdf.

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Photo Credit: Joshua A. Tucker