Economic Conditions and Presidential Elections (1997)
BibTeX
@MISC{Nagler97economicconditions,
author = {Jonathan Nagler and Jennifer R. Niemann},
title = {Economic Conditions and Presidential Elections},
year = {1997}
}
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Abstract
One of the more robust findings over the last 50 years in research on elections has been the importance of macroeconomic conditions on voting in U.S. presidential elections. An important contribution to that literature was made by Steven Weatherford in a 1978 article demonstrating that working class voters are more sensitive to economic conditions than are middle class voters in their vote choice. Weatherford's result was based on the 1956 through 1960 elections. We replicate Weatherford's result for 1960, and show that the substantive finding is extremely sensitive to the definition of class. When using occupation groups as the measure of class, we are able to essentially replicate Weatherford's result. However, using income as the measure of class we do not find any evidence to support the same finding for 1960. We then extend the analysis to cover the period 1956 thru 1996 using both an income-based measure of class and an occupation-based measure of class. We show that there does n...
