The Electoral Impact of Economic Conditions: Who is Held Responsible?

Abstract

A variety of recent research has dealt with the impact of economic conditions on congressional elections. The underlying assumption of this research has been that the effects of economic fluctuations are distributed evenly across members of the president's party. By focusing on subgroups of congressional candidates, we demonstrate that the importance of economic conditions varies widely. Specifically, we show that the aggregate electoral margins of incumbents are far more responsive to economic conditions than are those for nonincumbents, and that among in-party incumbents, the relationship is stronger among those with higher levels of tenure. Further, we demonstrate that the previous lack of individual-level confirmation of the aggregate relationship has been due to a failure to control for the contextual effects implied by our conditional aggregate analysis. With controls for district incumbency, we find a relationship between retrospective personal financial condition and vote choice that mirrors the aggregate relationship between retrospective performance of the national economy and congressional vote totals.