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Title: Is All Politics and Economics Local? National Elections and Local Economic Conditions

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2001

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Abstract: Scholars have long sought to understand the causal relationships between economics and political participation. Of particular concern has been how economic experiences have affected individuals' decisions to participate in elections and cast votes for candidates of different political parties. Practically all of the studies on elections in the United States have focused on national aggregate economic conditions and national aggregate political outcomes, while only a handful of studies have focused on whether state and local economic conditions affect federal elections. The conclusion one would reach from these studies is that the adage \all politics is local" does not apply to economics and elections. In fact, despite the findings of some early studies (e.g. Tufte 1975), recent research would lead us to conclude that economic conditions have no direct effects on congressional elections (Erikson 1990; Alesina and Rosenthal 1995). According to these recent studies, the economy is related to congressional elections only indirectly through its effects on presidential elections. And even in presidential elections, a key economic indicator|unemployment|appears to have little to no effect on presidential elections.In this paper, we question the conclusions of previous studies by considering how the failure to correctly model vote shares at the local level could produce misleading results on the effects for economic conditions on elections in local analysis. We develop a model for local vote shares by adapting a model derived in the empirical literature on demand for differentiated products. Our model explicitly accounts for nonlinearity and aggregation in vote share functions and so avoids some of the problems of standard linear specifications of vote shares that are common in the literature. We estimate our model using data at the local level to assess the impact of economic conditions on presidential vote shares and turnout in the 1992 election. We find that local unemployment does affect presidential votes and these effects vary by demographic groups in interesting ways.The paper proceeds as follows. In the section 2 we review the relevant literature on economics and elections. Section 3 discusses the derivation of our model for vote shares and how it is particularly appropriate for studying local economic conditions. Section 4 reports the results of the estimation of this model. Section 5 concludes with a discussion of our results and extensions of the work in the paper.

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Authors: Himmelberg, Charles P.; Wawro, Gregory

Publisher: Columbia University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Housing and Segregation

Countries: United States