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- Title
Relative Losses and Economic Voting: Sociotropic Considerations or 'Keeping up with the Joneses?'.
- Authors
Dettrey, Bryan J.
- Abstract
This article examines how pocketbook and sociotropic economic evaluations jointly affect economic voting behavior for those that have 'fallen behind' in their personal financial conditions relative to aggregate economic performance. According to reference-dependent and relative loss theories, those who have fallen behind should be less likely to support the incumbent president. Alternatively, attributing personal financial conditions to the incumbent is cognitively complex and can conflict with core values, and the sociotropic version of voting is typically stronger than the pocketbook version. These approaches are tested, and the results show that the sociotropic version of economic voting predominates even among those who have fallen behind. The results are robust to controls for nongovernmental sources of variation in personal financial conditions. These results have important implications for democratic accountability in an age of economic inequality. Related Articles
- Subjects
ECONOMIC voting; POCKET editions; VOTING research; DEMOCRACY; SOCIOECONOMICS; PERFORMANCE evaluation
- Publication
Politics & Policy, 2013, Vol 41, Issue 5, p788
- ISSN
1555-5623
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/polp.12038