Morris P. Fiorina

Economic Retrospective Voting in American National Elections: A Micro-Analysis*

A number of recent studies examine the traditional hypothesis that the electoral fortunes of the incumbent presidents party rise and fall in direct relation to fluctua- tions in the state of the national economy. Typically these studies employ a longitudi- nal design in which a partys aggregate congressional vote serves as the dependent variable, and various economic indicators serve as independent variables. On balance. the election returns appear to bear some relation to economic conditions, although various disagreements exist. Using data from the 1956 to 1974 SRC election studies this paper attempts to uncover an individual-level basis for the macro-relationship found by earlier studies. Specifically, do citizens vote for or against the incumbent presidents party as a function of their personal economic condition? The survey data permit us to conclude that a citizens personal economic condition affects his presi- dential vote. For congressional voting, however, the findings are positive until 1960 and negative thereafter. And contrary to some previous research, we find no system- atic relationship between a citizens personal economic condition and his decision to vote or abstain.

The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis

Various analysts have noted that the decision to vote in mass elections is difficult to justify from the standpoint of an expected utility maximization model. Put simply, the probability that a citizens vote will affect the outcome is so small that the expected gains from voting are outweighed by the costs in time and effort. Such analyses treat rational behavior as synonymous with expected utility maximization. In this paper we show that an alternative criterion for decision making under uncertainty, minimax regret, specifies voting under quite general conditions. Both two and three candidate plurality elections are considered. Interestingly, a minimax regret decision maker never votes for his second choice in a three candidate election, whereas expected utility maximizers clearly may. Thus, the model proposed has implications for candidate choice as well as turnout.

Legislative choice of regulatory forms: Legal process or administrative process?

SummaryA paper like this does not lend itself to conclusions. The unifying theme of the paper is a question: when and why does Congress choose to modify social and/or economic behavior by establishing a regulatory agency rather than by writing a law to be enforced in the courts? This is a special case of the more general question of why politicians delegate their power to administrators. I have not sought to answer that question in any definite way; rather, I have tried to identify some of the potential answers, most of which are mutually compatible, all of which have some support in the literature, and few of which have been dealt with systematically by modern political economists. I have ignored certain answers that appear in the literature — the complexity of modern problems, the demands on legislator time, and so forth. These may have some effect on what Congress decides to delegate, but in the main I believe they are largely rationalizations which scholars are too quick to believe. Where politicians have the incentive, they manage to deal with complexity, and they find the time to do it. It is our job to identify those incentives and trace their implications for the formation of public policy in this country. Without denigrating the work that has been done, it is fair to say that our work is only beginning, despite the extravagant claims of some authors to the contrary.

Committee Decisions under Majority Rule: An Experimental Study

This article reports the findings of a series of experiments on committee decision making under majority rule. The committee members had relatively fixed preferences, so that the process was one of making decisions rather than one of problem solving. The predictions of a variety of models drawn from Economics, Sociology, Political Science and Game Theory were compared to the experimental results. One predictive concept, the core of the noncooperative game without side payments (equivalent to the majority rule equilibrium) consistently performed best. Significantly, however, even when such an outcome did not exist, the experimental results did not display the degree of unpredictability that some theoretical work would suggest. An important subsidiary finding concerns the difference between experiments conducted under conditions of high stakes versus those conducted under conditions of much lower stakes. The findings in the two conditions differed considerably, thus calling into question the political applicability of numerous social psychological experiments in which subjects had little or no motivation.

The Case of the Vanishing Marginals: The Bureaucracy Did It

Several authors have addressed the postwar decline of electoral competition on the congressional level. Some have attributed the decline to institutional change such as the redistrictings of the 1960s. Others have remarked on the growing use of the growing resources of incumbency. Still others, like Ferejohn, have focused on behavioral change in the larger electoral system, such as the erosion of party identification. In this comment I suggest that while electoral behavior has changed, the change is at least in part a response to changing congressional behavior, which in turn is a reaction to institutional change for which Congress is partly responsible. Specifically, over time congressmen have placed increasing emphasis on district services: more and more they operate as and are perceived as ombudsmen rather than as national policymakers. This behavioral change is an understandable response to an expanding federal role and an increasing involvement of the federal bureaucracy in the lives of ordinary citizens, an institutional change Congress has helped to bring about.

DIVIDED GOVERNMENT IN THE AMERICAN STATES: A BYPRODUCT OF LEGISLATIVE PROFESSIONALISM?

S since World War II, divided government has become increasingly common in the American states. A significant component of the increase is the deterioration of Republican fortunes in state legislatures: after the 1990 and 1992 elections, for example, only five state legislatures were controlled by the Republicans. I shall examine the hypothesis that the professionalization of state legislatures makes legislative service more attractive to Democratic candidates and less attractive to Republican candidates, because full-time legislative service is incompatible with another career, and Democrats, on average, have less lucrative career opportunities than Republicans. Statistical analysis of post-World War II legislative elections outside the South is consistent with the argument: other things being equal, every ten-thousand-dollar increase in real biennial legislative compensation is associated with approximately a 1% increase in Democratic legislators.

Voters, bureaucrats and legislators: A rational choice perspective on the growth of bureaucracy

The claim that government is excessively bureaucratic can be interpreted as an assertion about inefficient factor proportions in the production of public goods. The rational choice theory of electoral competition is extended in this paper to include the election of representatives from separate districts, ombudsman activities by legislators, self-interested bureaucrats and production functions for public activities that have bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic arguments. If the demand for public goods grows exogenously through time, the model predicts increasingly inefficient factor proportions yet a growing advantage for incumbent legislators when they seek reelection.

Closeness Counts Only in Horseshoes and Dancing

During the period in which our article ( APSR vol. 68 [June 1974]) circulated in manuscript form it provoked an unusual amount of collegial reaction. Of course, we were quite prepared for a reaction from those who use decision-theoretic models in their research—they were our intended audience. More surprisingly, we also received comments from less directly involved bystanders—a medieval historian for example. All this correspondence indicates to us that nearly everyone has his own theory of how voters behave, and that most such theories do not agree with the one presented in our article. The comments of Professors Tullock, Beck, Mayer and Good, and Stephens further support this conclusion. In an appendix to this note we have responded to the imaginative point raised by Tullock. As for the traditional questions raised by our other critics, however, we adopt a different line of rebuttal. Rather than conduct an unfruitful debate over the a priori plausibility of the minimax regret model we will do something that theorists too seldom do: examine some data. Before doing so we will make an important distinction between using a model prescriptively and using it descriptively. (Decision-theoretic types tend to move a bit too easily from one usage to the other.) Then, after reviewing the major point of our article we will turn to the data.

Polarization in the American Public: Misconceptions and Misreadings

A lthough we are surprised that Abramowitz and Saunders continue to advance arguments that we have rebutted in other publications, we are grateful to the Journal for providing another opportunity to address some misconceptions in the study of popular polarization. We will reply pointby-point to the Abramowitz and Saunders critique, but given that our responses have been elaborated at length elsewhere, we refer interested readers to these sources for more detailed discussions (Fiorina and Abrams 2008; Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2006; Fiorina and Levendusky 2006;). Before proceeding, we emphasize one observation that partially vitiates several of the Abramowitz and Saunders criticisms. Much of the data they view as contradicting our conclusions consists of vote reports, election returns, and approval ratings. These variables obviously are of paramount political concern, but they can not be used as evidence of polarization—for or against. As explained in Culture War? centrist voters can register polarized choices, and even if the beliefs and positions of voters remain constant, their voting decisions and political evaluations will appear more polarized when the positions candidates adopt and the actions elected officials take become more extreme. When statistical relationships change, students of voting behavior have a tendency to locate the source of the change in voter attitudes, but unchanging voters may simply be responding to changes in candidate strategy and behavior. Abramowitz and Saunders exemplify this tendency and much of their critique goes astray as a result.

Some Problems in Studying the Effects of Resource Allocation in Congressional Elections

After analyzing (1) data aggregated to the congressional district level, and (2) individual-level data from the 1978 CPS election survey, Johannes and McAdams conclude that congressional casework has no electoral impact. The following commentary explains such null findings as the product of oversimplistic expectations and methodological weaknesses. Specifically, the Johannes and McAdams aggregate data analysis is misspecified on two counts. First, it attempts to reduce to a single regression equation a temporal sequence in which casework activity and electoral outcomes are mutually intertwined. Second, even were such a drastic reduction possible, the single equation employed would be poorly specified because of inattention to the differential productivity of cases, constituents, and representatives. The individual-level analysis also is rife with statistical problems chief among which is multicollinearity aggravated by small numbers of cases. Analyses that do what is possible to minimize such problems reveal a statistically and substantively significant impact of casework on electoral outcomes. Further analyses that go beyond the Johannes and McAdams limitation of casework effects to the individuals directly helped suggest that the electoral effects of an incumbents reputation for service may approach the effects of party identification.