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Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896–1964*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gerald H. Kramer
Gerald H. Kramer*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

This paper develops several simple multivariate statistical models and applies them to explain fluctuations in the aggregate vote for the United States House of Representatives, over the period 1896-1964. The basic hypothesis underlying these models is that voters are rational in at least the limited sense that their decisions as to whether to vote for an incumbent administration depend on whether its performance has been “satisfactory” according to some simple standard. Because of data limitations, the analysis focuses on measures of economic performance, treating other aspects of an incumbent's performance, such as its handling of foreign affairs, as stochastic perturbations of the underlying relationship to be estimated. (Examination of residuals suggests this assumption is not unreasonable, at least during peacetime.) Possible effects of coattails from presidential races, of incumbency, and of secular trends in the underlying partisanship of the electorate are also taken into account. The models, estimated by maximum-likelihood methods, are found to be successful. Close to two-thirds of the variance in the vote series is accounted for, and the structural coefficients of the models are of the correct signs and of quite reasonable magnitudes. Economic growth, as measured by the changes in real per capita income, is the major economic variable; unemployment or inflation have little independent effect. Presidential coattails are also found to be of some importance.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , March 1971 , pp. 131 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1971

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Footnotes

*

The research described in this article was performed at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University, under grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

References

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2 Though see Key, V. O. Jr., The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Ibid., p. 724.

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18 Ibid..

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20 It would also be natural to add a third disturbance, say z t , to represent the net effect of the personal characteristics of individual congressional candidates. However, as we have already noted, congressional candidates are relatively anonymous to most of their constituents, and congressional campaign efforts are typically much less extensive than those of either state-wide or local races; furthermore, this “personal” effect would be averaged over some 400-odd individual races, so the final net effect would be small indeed. Hence we shall ignore it.

21 Rees et al, op. cit.

22 Durant, op. cit.

23 Cummings, Milton C. Jr., Congressmen and the Electorate (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp. 135ffGoogle Scholar.

24 The other parameter estimates are close to those reported in Table 1, though the goodness of fit is some-what poorer.

25 Key, op. cit.

26 See Freeman, Harold, Introduction to Statistical Inference (Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1963), pp. 69ffGoogle Scholar; and Mood, A. M. and Graybill, F. A., Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 220ffGoogle Scholar.

27 See Freeman, op. cit., pp. 253c; and Mood and Graybill, op. cit. pp. 178ff.

28 See Freeman, op. cit., pp. 300ff; and Mood and Graybill, op. cit., pp. 297ff.

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