Why Informed Voters Rely on Economic Forecasts When Choosing Presidents

Why This Question Matters

Economic voting—the idea that voters reward or punish incumbents based on economic conditions—has long focused on retrospective judgments (how the economy has performed). Dean Lacy and Dino P. Christenson push the debate further by comparing four distinct economic evaluations voters use: retrospective national (sociotropic retrospective), retrospective pocketbook (personal retrospective), prospective national (sociotropic forecast), and prospective pocketbook (personal forecast). Understanding which of these evaluations drive vote choice matters for how scholars interpret election outcomes and for whether voters are acting on objective information or simply rationalizing partisan preferences.

What Lacy and Christenson Did

The authors analyze U.S. presidential election data from 1980 through 2004. They estimate a statistical model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations and explicitly tests how their effects change with voters' information and election expectations. Information and uncertainty about who will win serve as moderators, letting the authors see when voters consult past performance versus future forecasts in deciding their vote.

Key Findings

• Retrospective evaluations (both national and pocketbook) predict vote choice consistently and do not vary with how much information voters have.
• Prospective evaluations matter primarily for the most informed voters: when these voters expect the incumbent party to win, they rely on prospective national evaluations; when they are uncertain or expect a challenger victory, they put more weight on prospective pocketbook evaluations.
• Voters who hold accurate expectations about the election outcome show the strongest links between vote choice and sociotropic (national) economic evaluations, both retrospective and prospective.
• Voters whose economic evaluations appear most likely to be endogenous to their vote choice—that is, whose economic judgments might be shaped by their preferred candidate—show weaker relationships between economic evaluations and their votes than more objective voters.

What This Means for Economic Voting Research

The study broadens the view of economic voting by showing that forward-looking (prospective) assessments play a significant role, especially among informed voters, and that the form of prospective reasoning depends on voters' expectations about who will win. At the same time, the authors argue that fears about widespread endogeneity in economic evaluations—voters bending their assessments to match their vote—are likely overstated. For scholars and analysts, the findings highlight the importance of measuring voter information and expectations alongside retrospective and prospective economic judgments when studying electoral behavior.