Helmut Norpoth

Presidents and the Prospective Voter

The economy being the key to presidential popularity, what is the economic intelligence inspiring the approval judgments of American voters? According to one school of thought, the public relies on the current performance of the economy (the retrospective voter), while a rival makes the case for expectations about the future economy (the prospective voter). I conduct a time-series analysis combining consumer surveys and presidential approval polls (1960-1993). The results unequivocally reject the prospective claim and confirm the retrospective one. Depending on the measure used, economic expectations either prove too sensitive to political interventions (change in the White House, wars, and scandals) to shape presidential approval; or else, economic expectations do no more than encapsulate information about the current state of the economy. The research bears out the wisdom and the fairness of the retrospective calculus. To judge a presidents performance in office is not a question about things to come but about things done.

Guns and Butter and Government Popularity in Britain

Britain under the government of Prime Minister Thatcher provides a unique opportunity to probe the effects of both war and macroeconomic performance on government popularity. Monthly ratings for Thatcher and Conservative-party support (June 1979 to July 1985) are examined by way of Box-Tiao intervention models. The model that best captures the impact of the Falklands War of 1982 is of the gradual-temporary variety: popularity gains accrued through the three-month war shrink in a geometric fashion. Nevertheless, they prove to be worth over five percentage points for the Conservative party a year later, in the 1983 election. Macroeconomic performance, meanwhile, is found to have an asymmetric effect on government popularity, with unemployment strongly significant but inflation not significant at all. Apparently, the British public is punishing failure (on employment) while letting success (on inflation) go unrewarded. Qualifications of the positive effect of war and the negative effect of macroeconomic performance are suggested.

Economics, politics, and the cycle of presidential popularity

Does the economy hold the key to the ups and downs of the popularity of American presidents? This study, which is based on quarterly data from 1961 to 1980, employs stochastic models for time series (Box-Jenkins). For inflation, though not for unemployment, the findings confirm a significant effect at a lag of one quarter. The worries of political leaders about the inflation side of macroeconomic performance appear to be justified. Nevertheless, the influence of noneconomic factors such as international events, the Vietnam War, and Watergate proves even more potent. Moreover, presidential popularity is subject to a cycle whereby each president begins his service with an unearned popularity bonus that subsequently erodes. Economic performance is not found to be responsible for this inauguration-erosion cycle, but neither are rallies, wars, or scandal.

The loyalties of voters : a lifetime learning model

Introduction Parties Propose and Voters Dispose Unstable Parties A Lifetime Learning Model Family Loyalties Structure of Socio-economic Interests Values of Voters Placing Voters in Context The Performance of Parties and Leaders The Cumulative Effect of a Lifetime of Learning Change Through Time The Big Trade-off Facing Parties

Divided Government and Economic Voting

With one party in charge of the presidency and the other one in charge of Congress, how are American voters supposed to allocate credit and blame for the governments economic performance? The following solutions are proposed and tested: Hung Jury, where voters refuse to render an economic judgment on either president or Congress; Split Verdict, where voters reach separate judgments depending on whichever party is in control of a given branch; President Liable, where the electorate solves the responsibility problem by singling out the President and absolving Congress; and Congress Liable, with the roles of president and Congress reversed. The results show that the President Liable model wins easily under varying configurations of divided government as well as economic conditions. Divided government poses no noticeable obstacle for retrospective voting on the economy.

From Argentina to Zambia: a world-wide test of economic voting

Abstract Cross-national research on economic voting has to contend with wide variation in political context. How can voters be expected to translate economic preferences into partisan choices under such varying circumstances? Rather than specify all the components of the political context, we propose a simple rule consistent with the retrospective theory of voting: voters key on the major party in government. We conduct a test of that hypothesis, using the broadest possible universe of countries currently holding competitive elections. The results show that election-year economic growth influences the vote of the major party in office, but fails to have an effect on the combined votes cast for all incumbent parties. Diagnostic checks confirm that the electoral effect of economic growth is robust and not vulnerable to either multicollinearity or heteroscedasticity. The vast disparities in political context notwithstanding, voters around the world prove capable of practicing a standard form of economic voting. They do so by holding the major incumbent party accountable for recent economic performance.

Commander-in-chief or chief economist?: The president in the eye of the public

Abstract While popularity functions stress the influence of the economy, the institutional nature of the American presidency prompts the hypothesis that foreign policy has a more compelling hold on presidential approval. This analysis examines the effects of presidential evaluations in the domains of foreign policy and economy on overall presidential job approval. To avoid spurious claims of influence, we probe the antecedents of each of those policy approvals and employ a two-stage design for overall presidential approval. The data, in the form of aggregate time series, cover a 20-year period, ranging from the Ford Administration to the Clinton Administration. The main finding is that a presidents overall job approval depends just as much on his handling of foreign policy as it does on his handling of the economy. In other words, to maintain public support the chief executive must be ‘commander-in-chief’ and ‘chief economist’ in nearly equal measure.

Partisan Dealignment in the American Electorate: Itemizing the Deductions since 1964

According to the SRC-CPS surveys, the proportion of Americans identifying with a political party declined sharply between 1964 and 1976, from approximately 75 percent to 63 percent. In order to cast some light on the reasons for this dealignment, we examine the contributions made by the changing age composition of the electorate, the entry of new voters into the electorate, the party desertion among voters already in the electorate, and the suppression of age gains in partisanship. These four sources are shown to explain close to 100 percent of the aggregate decline from 1964 to 1976, with the single largest contribution made by entry of new voters. Nevertheless our findings indicate that the decline occurred throughout all age cohorts and suggest the potency of dealigning period forces. These forces simply had their strongest effect on those voters with predictably the least resistance, the youngest cohorts.

Popular influence on supreme court decisions

In their 1993 article in this Review , William Mishler and Reginald Sheehan reported evidence of both direct and indirect impacts of public opinion on Supreme Court decisions. Helmut Norpoth and Jeffrey Segal offer a methodological critique and in their own reanalysis of the data find, contrary to Mishler and Sheehan, no evidence for a direct path of influence from public opinion to Court decisions. Instead, they find an abrupt-permanent shift of judicial behavior consistent with an indirect model of influence whereby popularly elected presidents, through new appointments, affect the ideological complexion of the Court. In response, Mishler and Sheehan defend the direct public opinion linkage originally noted, at both individual and aggregate level; respond to the methodological critique; and offer further statistical analysis to support the aggregate linkages.

The PM and the Pendulum: Dynamic Forecasting of British Elections

We apply a dynamic perspective to forecasting votes and seats in British elections. Our vote model captures the swing of the electoral pendulum between the two major parties while using prime ministerial approval as the (sole) short-run predictor of vote choice. The seat model incorporates the inertia of the previous seat distribution while translating votes into seats. The models forecast the lead of one major party over the other (percentage for votes and number for seats). The statistical estimation includes data on British elections since 1945, although the test for cycles (swing of the electoral pendulum) goes as far back as 1832. The vote model picks the winner of every one of the 1945–2005 elections (out-of-sample forecasts) and is rarely off by more than 2 percentage points. The seat model does almost as well, rarely missing the seat lead by more than 25.