Several studies in economics have derived estimates of economic activity in the years prior to World War II that differ significantly from official statistics. In this paper we examine the possibility that the impact of economic retrospective voting upon congressional election outcomes has been at least partially obscured by shortcomings in the official data series. To that end we re-estimate various specifications of the basic Kramer model with these revised measures of income and unemployment. Although the effect of changes in real per capita income does not depend much upon which particular income series we used, the observed impact of unemployment doubles in size when the new estimates of historical unemployment rates made by Romer (1986b) and by Darby (1976) are used. Although the evidence is less than definitive, the results of our analyses also lend credence to the proposition that economic conditions have a greater impact upon congressional voting in on-year elections than in off years, and that the incumbent party is bound to suffer a midterm penalty. Copyright 1998 Blackwell Publishers Ltd..
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)