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Gasoline in the Voter’s Pocketbook: Driving Times to Work and the Electoral Implications of Gasoline Price Fluctuations

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Abstract

Gasoline prices are often a heated topic during presidential election campaigns in the United States. Yet, presidents have limited control over gasoline prices. Do voters reward or punish the president for changes in gasoline prices? Why might voters blame the president for an outcome beyond direct presidential control? This study addresses these questions by testing the effects of gasoline prices on pocketbook retrospection by voters. To capture the personal economic burden of gasoline prices, we rely on average driving times to work, given the inelastic nature of gasoline consumption for commuting. The results provide evidence for pocketbook voting: constituencies with longer average driving times to work are more likely to hold the president accountable for gasoline price increases. These findings have broader implications regarding electoral accountability and rationality in voting.

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We review recent advances in the study of retrospective voting, or how citizens evaluate and act on their perceptions of government performance. We describe new work in the traditional debates in the field, and present ideas on how to integrate those debates with emerging evidence with psychological foundations on voter shortcomings. Taken as a whole, the literature is providing a more complete and nuanced picture of the retrospective voter as sometimes, but not always, holding policymakers effectively accountable for their actions. We argue that the field is heading towards a middle ground in which voters are like decision makers in many other domains. They sometimes make mistakes, and often in predictable ways, but these mistakes are also consistent with a coherent logic governing many of their choices. Understanding the circumstances under which retrospective voting may achieve effective democratic accountability, and when it fails to do so, is an important theme that research is only beginning to expl...
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Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect politicians who deliver favorable outcomes. A second implication is that rational voters will not support a politician because of good outcomes unrelated to the politician’s actions. Specifically, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise, both in order to avoid electing incompetent, but lucky politicians, and to maximize the link between their votes and optimal incentives. This paper provides insight into the information processing capacities of voters, by measuring the extent to which they irrationally reward state governors for economic fluctuations that are plausibly unrelated to gubernatorial actions. Simple tests of relative performance evaluation reveal that voters evaluate their state’s economic performance relative to the national economy. However, these tests only provide evidence of rule-of-thumb performance filtering. More sophisticated tests reveal that voters in oil-producing states tend to re-elect incumbent governors during oil price rises, and vote them out of office when the oil price drops. Similarly, voters in pro-cyclical states are consistently fooled into re-electing incumbents during national booms, only to dump them during national recessions. Consistent with an emerging behavioral literature, this suggests that voters make systematic attribution errors and are best characterized as quasi-rational.
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