Suzanna Linn

Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes

Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account the economy itself, a substantial relationship between media tone and economic attitudes persists. Given that economic attitudes influence a wide variety of political outcomes, this finding carries important normative and political significance.

Economic Voting and Economic Inequality: U.S. Presidential Elections 1952–2012:

Most economic models of election outcomes make two assumptions: voters look at the aggregate economy, and they compare the state of the economy with some fixed reference. We argue that the increase in economic inequality and slowing of overall growth suggest these assumptions should no longer hold. We propose a theory that allows voters to take into account the distribution of economic growth, and we reconsider different decision rules voters could use to evaluate the incumbent. Analyzing presidential elections from 1952 through 2012, we show that models using the economic performance of individual income quintiles are indistinguishable in overall fit from models using aggregate income to predict election results, but can produce different predictions given different distributions of growth. And we show that voters do not appear to explicitly compare economic performance of the incumbent with the out-party, suggesting they have reneged on their role as rational gods of vengeance.