Abstract

David Primo, and panel participants at the 2002 meetings of the Midwest Political I explore a behavioral model of political participation, first introduced by Quattrone and Tversky (1988), based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). The implications of the model include an explanation for the midterm phenomenon when a “presidential responsibility” heuristic is assumed to be used by voters. Auxiliary predictions, including the prediction that midterm electorates represent a psychologically selected sample of the general electorate, are generated from the theory. The model is consistent with experimental findings in psychology as well as with the negative voting, surge and decline, midterm referendum, and the presidential penalty explanations This paper presents a individual-level, behavioral model of voting that is consistent with the midterm phenomenon. The theory is based on the assumption that voters are loss averse and attribute the effects of government policy to the sitting

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