Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Jonathon M. Clegg
Author-Workplace-Name: Faculty of History, University of Oxford
Author-Email:jonathon.clegg@oxfordalumni.org
Title: Perception vs Reality: How does the British electorate evaluate economic performance of incumbent governments in the post war period?
Abstract: Rational retrospective voting models have dominated the literature on election forecasting
and the economic vote since they were first proposed by Anthony Downs in 1957. The theory
views voters as appraisers of incumbent government’s past performance, which acts as the
principal source of information individuals use when making their vote. Pure retrospective
voting requires far less of the electorate in order to hold a government accountable and
empirical work based on this theory has been very adept at predicting election outcomes and
explaining individual voting decisions. In terms of the time period assessed to form
judgements on past performance however, there is a surprising disconnect between the
theoretical line of thought and actual testing. The sensible assumption of retrospective voting
models is that voters, looking to judge a government’s past performance, should assess
changes in their own welfare over an entire term of office, with little or no discounting of past
events. The majority of empirical studies however, focus on economic performance over
shorter time horizons, usually within a year of an election. There have only been a handful of
studies attempting to empirically test the correct temporal relationship between changes in
economic indicators and election outcomes, despite its importance for retrospective voting
models and democratic accountability. This working paper empirically tests over which time
horizons changes in macroeconomic fundamentals continue to have a significant bearing on
election outcomes in Post War Britain. It finds that longer-term measures of economic
change, over entire government terms, are better at predicting changes in incumbent’s vote
shares than shorter-term measures, closer to the election period. This has important
consequences for future voting models and is a promising result for democratic
accountability.
Classification-JEL: D72, C52
X-Keywords:
Length: 66 pages
Creation-Date: 2016-03-10
Number: _143
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/14424/143marchclegg-3.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_143