I have written several articles on the effect of the economy on elections. The first theme of these articles is that economic voting is complex beyond standard pocketbook voting or retrospective evaluations of the national economy. The second theme of this work is heterogeneity: the economy has different effects on vote choice for different voters. A third theme is to evaluate economic voting cross-nationally, especially in emerging democracies, with a focus on Taiwan. Finally, much of my work on this topic shows that voters look to the future as much as they focus on the past when evaluating the economy.
Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting, Political Behavior, 2017, with former Ohio State University grad student Dino Christenson, shows that prospective, or future-oriented, economic voting increases with a voter's political information while retrospective voting does not vary by voter information. We also show that the voters for whom economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous, or determined by their intended vote, are less likely to vote based on economic conditions than the rest of the electorate.
Information and Heterogeneity in Issue Voting: Evidence from the 2008 Presidential Election in Taiwan (with E. Niou, 2012, Journal of East Asian Studies) shows that information moderates the relationship between evaluations of the national economy and vote choice in Taiwan. A voter's own economic situation has no bearing on vote choice at any level of voter information.
In Economic Performance, Job Insecurity, and Electoral Choice, (2002. British Journal of Political Science), Anthony Mughan and I develop a measure of economic insecurity and show that economically insecure voters were more likely to vote for Ross Perot in the 1996 election. Several researchers have subsequently used our conception of economic insecurity to explain the vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
In “The Impact of the Economy on the 1996 Presidential Election: The Invisible Foot.” (Weisberg, Herbert F., and Janet Box-Steffensmeier, eds. Re-election 1996: How Americans Voted. Chatham House), former OSU grad student Tobin Grant and I show that a person's evaluation of the national economy predicts whether she will vote as well as how she will vote. This is one of the first articles to show that evaluations of the national economy affect voter turnout.
Attribution of responsibility for the economy poses a significant problem for evaluating retrospective economic voting in the United States since divided government and the federal system obscure who is to blame or reward for economic conditions. Taiwan's 1996 presidential election serves as an important test case for retrospective versus prospective voting since attribution of responsibility for past economic performance should be easy for voters in what was at the time a one-party state with the KMT in power in all levels and branches of government. Even in this "easy case" for retrospective voting, voters' evaluations of the future national economy under the competing presidential candidates mattered as much to their votes as evaluations of the past. (“Retrospective and Prospective Voting in a One-Party-Dominant Democracy: Taiwan’s 1996 Presidential Election.” Public Choice 97(3):383-99, with John Fu-sheng Hsieh and Emerson M.S. Niou. 1998.)
In “Economic Voting in the 1994 Taiwan Elections,” American Asian Review 14 (Summer): 51-70, also with Hsieh and Niou, we show that evaluations of the economy affected mayoral elections. The conventional wisdom at the time was that relations with China were the primary issue for Taiwanese voters. We show that the economy mattered just as much.