The influence of sections and periods on economic voting in American presidential elections: 1828–1984

POLITICAL

GEOGRAPHY

QUARTERLY,

Vol. 8, No. 3, July 1989, 271-288

The influence of sections and periods on economic voting in American presidential elections: 1828-1984 LARRY L. WADE

Department

of Political Science, University of California, Davis, California, CA 9316, USA

ABSTRACT. Previous longitudinal econometric studies of the influence of economic events on American presidential voting have failed to explore the prospect that such influence may well have been mediated by sectional and periodic factors. The unwarranted assumption that presidential elections have always occurred in a Downsian context featuring a relatively open and competitive party system seems to account for the neglect of regions and periods in other analyses. Using the Archer and Taylor classification of presidential voting sections and a more extended time series than heretofore employed, it is shown by means of regression analysis that economic voting was an important feature of presidential voting in the North, but much less so in the South and West, from 1828 to 1940. The estimates for economic voting for the more extended period 1828 to 1984, both nationally and by section, fail to show strong evidence for economic voting following World War II. Hypotheses to explain these results are advanced.

Introduction This study seeks to provide a new perspective on questions first raised several decades ago by scholars interested in the historic effect of economic fluctuations on voting in US national elections. By means of several multivariate statistical models involving geographic sections and historical periods as control variables, and more extended economic and voting series than heretofore employed, an effort is made to clarify a discussion that dates at least from Louis H. Bean’s 1940 Ballot Behavior: A Study of President&l Elections, one of the first statistical ventures into the ‘economics of voting’, and now a flourishing sub-discipline sparked

by Kramer’s

1972

paper

on the impact

of short-term

economic

fluctuations

on

The purpose is two-fold: to illuminate a matter of some substantive importance in American political and economic history, and to demonstrate that the approach and findings may have relevance for scholars interested in extending the economic theory of voting in other settings. It is not possible to summarize this literature here, but reference will be made to relevant studies where appropriate. (An excellent summary and bibliography may be found in Monroe, 1984.) voting

in congressional

0260-9827189103

0271-18

elections.

$03.00

0 1989 Butterworth

& Co (Publishers)

Ltd

272

Sectional and periodic influences on economic

voting in U.S. presidential elections

The organizing questions are: What, if any, impact have business cycles, or changes in business activity, had on presidential voting ? Is it possible that the impact has varied through time? And finally, has the impact varied across sectional or regional lines? Imerestingly enough, there seems to have been no close attention given in either the earlier or more recent statistical studies of economic voting in presidential elections to the conclusions of historians and political geographers concerning the importance of regional politics in American history and, hence, to the prospect that economic voting might be discernible in one section, but, for institutional reasons, not in another. Similarly, it does not appear that scholars have examined systematically the possibility that economic voting in presidential elections may have been more important in some historical periods than in others. (To be sure, the importance of region and period to economic voting in congressional elections has been recognized in a recent study by Radcliff, 1988). This study, then, considers the possible periodicity and sectional basis of economic voting in presidential elections, and examines that possibility over a considerably longer time-span than explored in other longitudinal econometric studies: from 1828 (the first election for which popular voting statistics are available) to 1984, a period of 156 years.

Prior

studies

In fact, there are few longitudinal econometric studies of presidential voting as such. (Bean sought to show that business activity had influenced voting for members of Congress from 1858 to 1938, provoking a rather indignant reply from Wilkinson and Hart, 1950, who insisted that there were no correlations between the economy and voting when the data were properly analyzed. Unfortunately, their own ‘model’ was nearly as poorly specified as Bean’s and has little present relevance.) Among contemporary studies, the well-known articles of Kramer, 1972; Stigler, 1973; Arcelus and Meltzer, 1975; Bloom and Price, 1975; Tufte, 1975; and Owens, 1984, explore the effects of economic conditions on congressional voting (although Kramer, in something of an aside, did examine presidential voting from 1896 to 1964 with limited positive results). Others (e.g., Tufte, 1978; Markus, 1988) have found connections between economic fluctuations and presidential voting in post-World War II elections, but the results are limited by the small number of political events. Similarly, the burgeoning literature on the effect of economic conditions on presidential popularity (see Monroe, 1984: 40-41 for a synopsis) is not directly relevant, given the individual-level data, model specifications, and time periods used, although some findings have implications for interpretations of the estimates presented below. Several longitudinal studies of the economy and presidential voting are of greater pertinence. Rosenstone (1982) argued persuasively that at least since 1896 economic adversity has reduced turnout in presidential elections. Such a tendency would in some measure qualify, but not disallow, a present hypothesis that incumbent presidential parties suffer at the polls if they preside over a declining economy. Kirchgassner (1981) examined the presidential vote from 1896 to 1976, concluding that inflation was the best economic predictor of the vote (income and unemployment far less so), incumbency mediates the effect of the economy, and that, in any case, voters have a ‘high discount rate’ for the economy (a perhaps overly facile explanation in view of findings to be reported). More directly pertinent, in part because his major predictor variable was similar to that used below, is Fair’s (1978) study of presidential elections from 1896 to 1976 and his finding that only after 1916 were changes in per capita GNP related to voting. Fair’s analysis is quite sophisticated on both theoretical and empirical planes. However, it can be suggested that his model is under-specified. By use of longer data series and the intro-

LARRYL. WADE

duction of additional control variables, certain of Fair’s observations (e.g., that elections prior to 19 16 are not explained by economic voting, or that voters have a ‘perhaps infinite’ discount rate for economic performance) may be clarified. The apparently consistent a priori assumption in the longitudinal studies that a Downsian or quasi-Downsian process (Downs, 1957) involving free and com~titive elections has always characterized American presidential elections lies at the heart of the problem. Fair is by no means alone in advancing a general model of voting behavior that conforms more or less to liberal democratic theory (Fair actually says ‘classic’ democratic theory, but it is apparent that he means liberal theory}. Rational individuals, variously informed, evaluate incumbent governments or competing parties and make a self-interested calculation as to which party will best serve their economic interests: relevant in this calculation is the short-term economic performance of government (operationalized as the presidency). Such assumptions are entirely reasonable in some quasi-experimental designs: but any design, including the organization of the party and electoral system, must itself conform reasonably to the assumptions.

The standard and plausible axiom in the econometric studies of presidential voting that voters hold the presidential party responsible for economic conditions is also adopted here, but whether the electoral system has always been so organized that individual evaluations could be aggregated in a reasonably authentic fashion is an empirical matter. Students of sectional politics have not taken a sanguine view of the question. We cannot review here the vast literature on American sectional politics, although it is helpful to note that, until the 1930s sectionalism was a standard focus in interpretive politics (Turner, 1932), but was then largely replaced in American political science with an emphasis on social class and the nationalization of politics said to have occurred with the New Deal. The subject is now undergoing a considerable revitalization: see Kasperson and Minghi, 1969; Brunn, 1974; Archer and Taylor, 1981; Archer and Shelley, 1986). Archer and Taylor in pa~icular have shown systematically the importance of sections to presidential voting from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The persistence of sectional differences is quite remarkable, although it is important to stress the obvious fact that intra-sectional politics have changed substantially, even fundamentally, over time: e.g., in presidential voting the once solid Democratic South has evaporated, and a strong if not solid Republican West has, at least over recent elections, emerged. But such far-reaching changes should not be taken as having eliminated a distinctive sectional politics: that is a different subject entirely. The very considerable overlap of sectional voting with types of party organization, or systems of interest-aggregation, has also been shown recently in Mayhew’s path-breaking study (1986), which reaches deep into American history to trace the very different electoral consequences of the varied and durable party arrangements that evolved in different states. In the present context, it is useful to note that Mayhew shows just how different Southern party organizations have been from the party organization found in much of the North. (See also Chambers and Burnham, 1967; David, 1972; Bonadio, 1974). Fortunately for the purposes of this study, Archer and Taylor (1981) provide an analysis of state-1eveI voting in presidential elections from 1832 to 1980 based upon factor analytic techniques. Their approach groups the Iower 48 states into three non-arbitra~ presidential voting sections: South, North, and West. With one minor modification (the addition of Alaska and Hawaii to the Western section), the Archer and Taylor categories are used here. The boundaries between sections turn out to be roughly what one might expect, so that the present virtue of the classification (beyond showing the continued relevance of geographic

274

Sectional and periodic influences on economic

voting in U.S. presidential elections

voting) lies in its treatment of borderline cases. Both Texas and Oklahoma are placed in the South; states wetst of the 100th meridian (beginning with the Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska) in the West; states north of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the 100th meridian comprise the North (for a location map, see Murauskas, Archer, and Shelley, 1988: 67). For most of American history, sectional differences between the North and the South defined much of national politics (although, not inconsistently, the West also played an important part in national politics both before and following the Civil War). Although many factors were important, including political culture, patterns of settlement, and religious distinctions, historians have with good reason emphasized the economic basis, slavery included, of that division. That is not to say, however, that short-term economic voting has been of equal importance in each section. Although the evolved mosaic was complex (Key, 1949, is still seminal), the one-party Democratic South had its origin in the two decades before the Civil War, was emerging in 1876, and persisted until 1952 (actually, the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 was an indicator of things to come). Southern political particularism dates from at least the time of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 when the South began to lose its national political supremacy to the more dynamic and growing North. Following the Civil War, the dominant thesis of Southern politics focused on the ‘lost cause’ and anathema to the party of Lincoln and the freedmen. The result was one-party rule that with the end of reconstruction set about effectively to void the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. By 1880, the solid South as a voting bloc in national elections was fully formed, and serious competition for office now occurred only within the Democratic party itself. The politics of exclusion (Roseboom, 1964; Kousser, 1974; Gaither, 1977) was deepened after the populist shock of 1892 threatened conservative dominance of the party. To contain the challenge from below involving both blacks and poor whites, the poll tax, ‘understanding clauses’, and white primaries were introduced. Popular participation was further limited (Ewing, 1940) by a local Republican ‘party’having no chance of victory-content to enjoy the patronage that came from regular Republican victories in presidential elections. Sincere contestation for power was no part of its program, a pattern that was not to be broken until the 1950s (Billington, 1975). Thus, the South’s elite-dominated ‘traditionalistic’ political culture, to use Elazar’s term (1984; see also Johnson, 1976 and Hanson, 1980), was one in which the goal of the political .uticipation and system was to maintain the existing order, chiefly by limiting popul~ inter-party competition. The full story is of course much more involved, but the essential point is that for many years the Southern electoral system was simply not capable of aggregating individual preferences on the current economic performance of the White House. On the contrary, from a functional point of view, a narrow electoral politics of exclusion was organized with the seeming aim of preserving racial and class privilege in the long run regardless of current presidential performance on the economy. Moreover, since presidential elections are really several separate state elections, even a defector from the lost cause seeking to be a rational economic voter might reasonably have concluded that a vote for the Republican candidate was a purely expressive act. Such a conclusion would have been reinforced by the resulting fact that both major parties largely ignored Southern interests in selecting presidential nominees and in identifying campaign themes and strategies. As Schattschneider (1960: 77) put it, the solid South ‘became possible when the southern conservative Democrats decided that they were willing to abandon their ambitions to win power nationally in return for undisputed control of the South’. The North’s political history is equally complicated but, for a number of reasons, it

LARRY L. WADE

275

adopted and maintained a more competitive (notwithstanding a long period of Republican dominance) and open party system. The nation-wide mass mobilization of the democratizing 1820s deeply penetrated the North. Property requirements for voting were discontinued, virtually universal white male suffrage was extended in all new states after 1789, and by 1828 presidential electors were chosen by popular vote everywhere except Delaware. In 1840, over 80 percent of the eligible electorate voted in the presidential election. This was the hearty democracy observed by Tocqueville. The Second-Party System emerged victorious over the anti-politics of the Era of Good Feeling (Fishel, 1978), as the sectional election of 1824 gave way to the party election of 1828. Ceaser’s study (1979: 30) confirms that it was Martin Van Buren, with his New York/Virginia coalition, who was most instrumental in advancing the cause of party above section and successfully ‘proposed the establishment of permanent competition between two parties that were safe and moderate in their principles and that together would normally control the path of access to the Presidency’. The inter-party competition of Van Buren’s inspiration has, if imperfectly, persisted in the North to the present day, while, in the South, it was arrested and terminated by slavery, the Civil War, reconstruction, white supremacy, and class bias. Unlike the situation in the South, electoral institutions gave opportunity for the relatively free play of individual economic interests and evaluations in voting. Moreover, according to Elazar (1984) the North’s ‘individualistic’ political culture was one in which the political process was viewed much as an economic marketplace in which political actions are determined by public demands organized primarily by strong party competition. In such a setting, individual economic calculations might be expected to be important in presidential elections, and it is plausible to expect that some version of the theory of economic voting might explain a significant proportion of Northern voting. Western sectionalism is of course of more recent vintage, and historians debate whether the political and electoral institutions that evolved in the West can be regarded as in some sense ‘more democratic’ than those of the larger, meaning Northern, society. One perspective (e.g., Billington and Ridge, 1982) holds that the pioneering experience fostered a more open, innovative, and participatory politics in the West. If correct, widened opportunities for the expression of individual economic evaluations of governmental performance might have been forged. On the other hand, less institutionalized political parties might (as Mayhew’s classification suggests), as relatively less efficient propagandists and organizers, have also composed preferences less efficiently. The urban political ‘machine’ by which party ‘bosses’ mobilized a dependable party vote was a foreign institution; likewise, there was an absence of prior leadership structures by which opinion could be more genteelly led. Western political individualism was thus created, and in the process a close approximation to a stylized Downsian voter, albeit one who may have lacked effective avenues for expressing political preferences. In this connection, Mayhew shows that Western parties came to rely much more on (weaker) purposive than material incentives to keep party competition vital and alive. The political culture of the West was, again to refer to Elazar’s categories, an amalgam of traditionalistic, individualistic and, importantly, moralistic outlooks. While inter-party competition may or may not be strong in moralistic cultures, the goal is to achieve the greatest good for the community, meaning that public-regarding rather than self-regarding political behavior is emphasized. By hypothesis, then, less institutionalized party organizations and the presence of moralistic and traditionalist political outlooks may have inhibited the expression of individual short-term and self-interested economic voting in the West. Also, in Wallerstein’s (1974) terms, the West was a periphery of the core for most of its history, and Western voting might have been dominated by structural economic issues

Sectional and periodic infltlences on economic voting in U.S. presidential elections

276

rather than short-term economic fluctuations. Regional development was of particular concern, and included subjugation of the Indians, disposal of the public lands at low costs, access to cheap money, and external investments in rail transport (Agnew, 1987: 108). Such concerns may have dominated short-term economic calculations in voting. Moreover, the Western agricultural and mineral-based economy was not always highly correlated with that of the industrial North which, for decades, comprised most of the national economy. For example, there were long stretches of economic misery in the West (especially in agriculture) that had little to do with economic events elsewhere (Shannon, 1936; Fite, 1966; Stroup, 1988). As residents of a dependent and peripheral region, the West’s voters, given local economic circumstances, may have had few incentives for responding to national, or largely Northern, economic fluctuations in the manner presumed in other econometric studies of economic voting. (It would be interesting to know, in this connection, if Western voters responded to regional fluctuations in economic activity as the theory of economic voting would predict.) For such reasons, one cannot confidently expect to find in Western political history strong evidence of sustained short-term economic voting based on national economic conditions. Periodicity and economic

voting

Just as regional politics and institutions may have compromised or facilitated short-term economic voting, it is not unlikely that different eras have been more congenial than others to its expression. Rather than form a completely a priori judgment on this prospect, the following procedure has been adopted: if the volatility of the vote over some extended period seems to have increased greatly relative to volatility of the economy, there is a prima facie case that other, non-economic issues have entered to overshadow short-term economic events in the electoral process. The face validity of this approach is suggested in FiRwe I, where the change in the vote for the incumbent presidential party from one election to the

I

I

I

20 .1972 .I964

10

.1984

0

.I904

.I872 . . .

. .. .

. .

!g28. 1936 .1956

.. .

.1908

. i924

.I876

lg40. *

1952 .I960

. 1980

-10 .I976 .1920 .1932

.I968

-20 1800

1850

1900

1950

FIGURE 1. Percent change in proportion of the total popular vote received by the incumbent presidential party from one election to the next, 1828-1984. (See text for omitted elections).

2000

LARRY L. WADE

277

next is plotted from 1828 to 1984. The results are quite revealing, even dramatic: the heteroscedastic, or fan-shaped, pattern is unmistakable. Prior to the Great Depression and World War II, there was much less variability in the gains and losses that accrued to incumbent presidential parties in the subsequent election than has been true since, even though economic fluctuations were often more severe than during the post-war period. Indeed, more recent decades are marked by historically extravagant deviations (both positive and negative) in support given to incumbent presidential parties when they next stood for election. The literature provides some possible insights into these developments. The sharp deviation of 1932 is consistent with the economic-voting hypothesis, but the post-war period, which was, at least until the 1970s a period of general economic expansion, suggests that other issues emerged possibly to govern many voters’ calculations (Petrocik, 1981). These might well include the global role assumed by the United States since 1945 and the resulting insecurities posed in a nuclear age by a perceived Soviet threat to national security (Gopoian et al., 1987), the decline of party responsibility as candidate-centered (Hart, 1987) and media-oriented (Edelman, 1988) campaigns altered traditional political practices and eroded the interest-aggregating functions of political parties (Rabinowitz et al., 1984), and the enhanced importance, in a more prosperous society, of style and social issues relative to economic ones (Inglehart, 1971; Ladd and Hadley, 1975; Bell, 1976; Knoke, 1976). In any case, and regardless of the precise reasons that account for the volatility in support for incumbent parties in recent years, there are some conceptual and empirical grounds for supposing that short-term economic voting may have declined compared to its importance in earlier periods. The hypotheses having been stated, the data employed to model the impact of economic events on regional and periodic voting are described below.

The business-activity

index

The business cycle refers to the ebb and flow of business activity that occurs around any long-term trend-in this case, per capita gross national product (GNP). In American history, of course, the long-term trend of GNP has been positive. Short-term fluctuations are oscillations of actual GNP around potential GNP caused by changes in aggregate demand and aggregate supply. Changes in total real output produce increases or decreases in employment and living standards, since the amount of goods and services available varies with total output. In this study, long-term GNP has been de-trended (i.e., the secular growth in per capita GNP has been removed by first-order differencing) and the focus is on the fluctuations in the general pace of business activity (defined by percentage changes in real per capita GNP) between presidential elections. A decline in business activity means falling employment, household income, sales, profits and investments. Recovery means rising employment, household income, consumer-spending, sales, profits and investments. We ask: have these fluctuations influenced presidential voting since 1828 in ways that can be estimated statistically? The data on business fluctuations, on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ times, considered here are those used to construct the AmeriTrust index (1987, updated annually) of economic activity. The index is a standard description of business cycles in American history (a graphical depiction may be found in Lipsey, Steiner and Purvis, 1987: 546-547), and is derived from calculating yearly, then monthly, business activity, fitting a trend line, and then identifying the deviations of the index from its trend value. The index is stated in percentage and per capita terms. The construction of the index is too complex to describe fully here, except to

278

Sectional and periodic influences on economic voting in

U.S. ~res~de~l~a~elections

say that it is derived from some four overlapped data series, each series itself being composed of several weighted production series. The data used have been adjusted over time to reflect the changing structure of the American economy. Whatever the limitations of the index, it clearly identifies virtually all of the many troughs, peaks, turning points, and durations in business activity identified by economic historians, from the Sea-Borne Commerce Prosperity of 1794-1796 to the Reagan recession of 1982-1983. The hypotheses to be examined here are quite straightforward: rising per capita GNP is expected to result in an increase in the vote (expressed as a percentage of the total popular vote) for the incumbent presidential party; declining per capita GNP in a loss of vote share. The simplicity of hypotheses is in part a function of the aggregate data available: we cannot, as done in recent survey research studies (Kinder and Kiewiet, 198 1; Lau and Sears, 198 1; Weatherford, 1982; Lewis-Beck, lY85), assess the extent to which the rational voting presumed was based on the voter’s personal economic circumstances or on some regard for the general well-being of others (sociotropic voting). For the same reason, this study does not disaggregate macroeconomic conditions into such factors as prices, employment, and nominal/real income as in some other reports covering more recent periods. Arguably, this may be no great loss, since employment and income vary together with the business cycle, and given Fair’s (1978) and Lanoue’s (1987) empirical confirmation that income alone was the most suitable predictor in their time-series models. This is not to minimize the caution that must be used with data of the sort employed here, even though they provide one of the few comprehensive glimpses into the total American economy from the late eighteenth century to the present. The data, while rich, are also cruder that today’s statisticians would prefer. The data series are spliced and involve concepts that have no doubt changed subtly over the years as data-gathering procedures changed. And, of course, the structure of the economy has changed greatly since the 1820s when the analysis begins, and one can question whether there is sufficient continuity to give meaning to an econometric search for a constant underlying theme. As Eckstein and Girola (1978: 323) admonish: ‘It would be dangerous to push long-run historical analysis too far by attempting to distinguish among competing hypotheses where statistical tests would rest upon rather fine differences in the result. Long-term historical analyses can yield useful insights only if the results are strong’. In examining the results below, therefore, it will be necessary to insist upon considerable robustness in the estimates before rejecting the nullhypotheses.

Control

variables

Although we are interested in the effects of economic change on voting, it would be wrong to expect that voting is entirely a function of economic events. Voting is influenced by many other factors as well, and if these are correlated with economic change, estimation of a bivariate model (voting and economic change) will attribute to economic change some of the voting due to the non-economic factors. Consequently, the estimated coefficient in a bivariate model could be quite misleading. It is therefore necessary to consider multivariate models, even though the additional control variables themselves, excepting sectional and periodic factors, are not of present theoretical interest. Five such variables are included in the analysis: section, period, realigning elections, incum~ncy, and popularity. The rationale for including the geographical and periodic bases of voting has been given. The anticipated effects of the other variables are also based upon their prominence in the literature. Ladd (1986: 23) has suggested that the term realignment has three separate meanings: ‘(1) major social groups changing their partisan loyalties and voting differently than they did

LARRYL. WADE

279

in times past; (2) a significant net change in the partisan balance of power; and (3) the emergence of a new majority party.’ Of interest here are meanings (1) and (2), which in combination approximate to what is meant by party identification or party 1oyaIty. Whatever the sources of realignmentswars, secular economic transformations, generational change and social drift-and whether they are more proximately produced by newly mobilized voters (Anderson, 1979; Beck, 1979; Campbell, 1985), party defectors (Ladd and Hadiey, 1978; Erikson and Tedin, 198 l), or some combination, it is helpful to control for the effects such secular political shifts may have on voting while estimating the role of short-term economic fluctuations. Realignment here takes the form of an indicator variab1e and includes the elections of 1832 (the base year, 1828, cannot be entered, since it is change from that year to 1832 that comprises the first case), 1872 (1868 is Iost in differencing and because the realigning Civil War elections are not included in the analysis), 1892-1896, 1928-1932, and 1948-1952 (to accommodate Archer and Taylor’s claim (1981: 209) on the neglected significance of the 1948 election). The dependent variable in the analysis consists of the percentage change in the total popular vote (national or sectional) for the incum~nt party from one eIection to the next. This means that the influence of incumbency is felt on the left-hand side rather than the right-hand side of the regression equations. Generally speaking, this is a superior form of controlling for the effect of what would otherwise have to be entered as a dummy variable, and is also consistent with Stigler’s point that the major parties do not differ in their capacity to affect economic developments. In both the Kirchgassner and Fair studies, incum~ncy appeared to bestow an electoral advantage on the party in power, offsetting somewhat the disadvantages of presiding over a declining economy. Whatever the expected power of incumbency, it is not inconsistent to anticipate, for theoretical reasons (Frey and Schneider, 1978) confirmed by recent survey research (Stimson, 1976; Monroe, 1984: 145), that presidential/party popularity in competitive party settings generally declines over time. A president must necessarily take action that will offend some erstwhile voters and erode support between elections, and we expect that this effect will be generalized to encompass the presidential party as well. In the present analysis, presidential/party popularity is denoted by time in office as expressed by the election year itself (e.g., 1896), rather than, as is more common, by case number (e.g., 1, 2, 3 . . n); thus the relevant unstandardized regression coefficients can be interpreted directly with a rather small degree of error (since differences in multiphers are small). The standardized coefficients are also provided for those who may be skeptical of this claim. If the presumed connection between time in office and loss of support is correct, the coefficients should have a negative sign.

Models and estimates Several regression equations were estimated, not all of which, for reasons given, were expected to lead to the rejection of the null hypotheses. Both the voting and economic data were de-trended by differencing, and no serious serial correlation remains in either series, meaning that ordinary least-squares regression analysis is appropriate. Several elections are not included. With respect to Southern voting, the elections of 1860, 1864 and 1868 were omitted and the series resumes with the change in the popular vote for the incum~nt party from 1872. This was done to exclude elections in which the South either did not participate or was controlled by the forces of Reconstruction (‘carpetbag rule’). For the North and the nation, the elections of 1860 and 1864 were omitted: war and the prospect of war dominated all else. In the West, the series begins in 1876; prior to that time, the popular

280

Sectional and periodic influences on economic voting in U.S. ~yes~denti~lelections

vote in the West involved only a few states and was inconsequential in size. In all analyses, the election of 19 12 was dropped: it seems impossible to determine if the electors regarded the ‘incumbent’ presidential party to be represented by Taft or Roosevelt. Following Kramer’s (1972) practice, the war year of 1944 was also excluded (although retention would further accentuate the decline of post-Depression economic voting, since Roosevelt’s vote-share declined from 1940 even though the war economy had boomed). Previous research (Kramer, 1972) has suggested that one-year change in economic trends is a superior predictor of the vote than either some longer time period or the state of the economy at election time. Even though one-year changes have become conventional, Stigler (197 3) argued that two-year change (from one congressional election to another) is a more relevant period for a rational voter in such elections to assess. Fair (1978) regarded the voter as much more myopic: voters are said to consider only the situation at election time as measured by the current rate of growth in real income. It is of some interest, therefore, that in the present study, four-year change in the business activity index provides a better fit between model and data than one-year or two-year change or current trends. Thus, some evidence is provided here for the view that the electorate may not always have been as shortsighted as sometimes suggested, and on behalf of the reasonable proposition that rational voters would evaluate presidential parties over their full terms. All dependent variables (NATION, SOUTH, NORTH, WEST) consist in the percentage change from one election to the next in the total popular vote received in the nation or section by the incumbent presidential party. We may now identify the equations, each of which has been estimated for the time periods suggested in Figure 1: 1828-1940 and 1828-1984. All have the same structural form, in that the different response variables are regressed against the same predictor variables (multicollinearity is not an issue), so that: NATION, SOUTH, NORTH, or WEST = constant + FYC (four-year change: or percentage change, per capita, in the business activity index from November to one election year to November of the next election year) + REALIGN (realigning elections) - POPULARITY (the election year) + error term. The first equation regressed NATION against the regressors for the entire period, 1828-1984. Because it was expected that post-World War II voting volatility, the long period of exclusive Southern politics, and the peripheral position of the West in the national economy would repress the influence of economic voting, strong positive findings were not predicted. The OLS regression estimates, shown in Table I, are not altogether uninteresting, however: the coefficient of FYC (0.19) is statistically significant at the 0.02 level (other independent variables are far from acceptable significance levels), although, given the absence of an obviously relevant universe, it is not clear what such tests signify in the present context. The major statistical hurdle relates to the positive aut~orrelation in the error term of the model: the Durbin-Watson ratio of 3.14 requires that the null hypotheses be accepted and the model itself regarded as inadequately specified, even though it is by no means established that the practical significance of FYC would be erased in a more functional model. (The presence of autocorrelation of the errors in the present singleequation models implies mis-specification and inefficiency in the parameter estimates, not bias and inconsistency as would be the case in dynamic models, and which would call for corrective measures other than improved specification.) In any case, the findings are not at odds with expectations, and do give off a faint echo of (possible) economic voting. It is of some interest to note that over the entire period Richard Nixon’s 1972 election is the only outlier (studentized residual= 3.24). The economic index declined 3 percent from 1968,

LARRYL. WADE

281

TABLE 1. 1828-1984

Coefficienl

Stundard error

-21.32 0.19 0.83 0.01

53.68 0.08 3.20 0.03

Standard coefficient

I

p (2.tail)

- 0.40 2.45 0.26 0.35

0.69 0.02 0.80 0.73

NA TION

Constant FYC Realign Popularity

0.00 0.42 0.05 0.06

N = 32; R-square = 0.18; standard error = 7.40; F-ratio = 2.03; p = 0.13; Durbin-Watson = 3.14. SOUTH

Constant Fyc Realign Popularity

- 79.73 0.19 1.96 0.04

89.70 0.13 5.67 0.05

0.00 0.27 0.07 0.16

- 0.89 1.42 0.35 0.85

0.38 0.17 0.73 0.40

N = 30; R-square= 0.09; standard error = 12.13; F-ratio = 0.88; p= 0.46; Durbin-Watson = 2.85. NORTH

Constant Fyc Realign Popularity

1.92 0.21 1.67 - 0.002

N= 32; R-square=0.20; Durbin-Watson = 2.96.

54.48 0.08 3.25 0.03

0.00 0.45 0.09 - 0.01

0.04 2.65 0.51 - 0.08

0.97 0.01 0.61 0.94

standard error= 7.51; F-ratio= 2.36; p=O.O9;

WEST

Constant Fyc Realign Popularity

68.35 0.16 5.97 - 0.04

N= 23; R-square=0.08; Durbin-Watson = 2.29.

but Nixon’s

vote-share

important). As anticipated,

increased

the 1828-1984

170.61 0.16 7.34 0.09

0.00 0.23 0.19 - 0.09

0.40 0.10 0.81 - 0.42

0.69 0.33 0.43 0.68

standard error= 13.69; F-ratio= 0.55; p= 0.65;

over 17 percent results

(the absence

for SOUTH

of the Wallace

are even less impressive

factor was than those

need not be commented on in detail. WEST similarly failed to show persuasive evidence of economic voting. The NORTH estimates are somewhat more positive than NATION. All signs are in the predicted direction; the regression coefficient of 0.21 for FYC is significant at the 0.01 level (other control variables art below conventional levels); the coefficient of determination is 0.20; the standard error of the estimate is 7.5 (although understated because of serial correlation in the error term); and the model as a whole IS significant at the 0.09 level (or 0.05 level in a one-tail test, which is technically applicable). Again, however, the positive autocorrelation in the disturbances (Durbin-Watson = 2.96) requires acceptance of the null hypotheses. It seems clear that the model is inadequately specified and of the national

model

(FYC is not statistically

significant)

and for that reason

282

Sectional and periodic influences on economic voting in U.S. presidentialeiectiom

fails to include an important explanatory variable/s, even though, as with NATION, the model does hint at the presence of economic voting. Since it has been indicated why this might be so, we may go directly to the question of periodicity and section in short-term economic voting by considering the period 18281940. The approach taken is precisely equivalent to including these variables in a comprehensive equation (Achen, 1982: 17-30), but has the added virtue of presenting the findings in somewhat clearer terms. With period and section now to be controlled in a manner consistent with the theoretical argument, the following is expected: clear and robust evidence for short-term economic voting in the North, and greatly reduced, even if perceptible, evidence for such voting in the South and West. The estimates for NATION, which is an amalgam of sectional voting, should be ‘in between’ NORTH and the other regions. The OLS regression estimates are presented in Table 2, and are consistent with all hypotheses. The estimates for NATION are of ‘borderline‘ quality. The model as a whole meets conventional standards of statistical significance, as does FYC, which has a regression coefficient of 0.21 and a very small standard error; REALIGN would be signi~cant at the 0.09 level in a one-tail test; POPULARITY, while lacking in statistical significance, has the predicted negative sign; the R-square of 0.55 is substantial for such a simple model; and the standard error of the estimate of 4.1 is narrowly bounded. Serial correlation in the error term (1.74) just exceeds the Durbin-Watson upper critical point (1.67) for sample size and number of regressors (and is far below that found in the 1828-1924 analysis). In short, the model is still less than adequate, but strongly suggests that periodicity is im~rtant in a properly specified model. The introduction of sections as control variables clarifies the situation further. As expected, the model for SOUTH does not fit the data at all well: it is not statistically significant; the Durbin-Watson ratio is excessive; the standard error of the estimate (underestimated given the autocorrelation), is twice as Iarge as for NATION; the R-square is not overly impressive in a time-series context; the control variables are not statistically significant; and POPULARITY takes the wrong sign. FYC does show a statistically significant effect, but because of the need, as explained earlier, for very robust model estimates, cannot be taken to refute the null hypothesis. In short, it appears that a very different theory would be necessary to explain presidential voting in the South over the 1828-1940 period, even if the estimates do hint at some possible economic voting, Similarly, the estimates for West do not point to the presence of strong short-term economic voting; the FYC coefficient is signifiant at only the 0.24 level, far below that for SOUTH. Thus, the short-term economicvoting hypothesis fails even more notably in the West than in the South, a perhaps surprising finding. However, the viability of the present theoretical statement depends on the analysis of voting in the North, and it is on virtually all points consistent with earlier predictions. Serial correlation is no longer an issue (skirting Durbin-Watson’s lower critical point); the model is statistically significant at the 0.000 level, and the standard error of the regression is quite confined. All independent variables have the predicted signs and are statistically significant (POPULARITY in a one-tail test, which is appropriate). FYC, the variable of greatest interest, has a slope of 0.22 and a very small standard error of 0.05. Recall also that FYC had to ‘override’ incumbency, which is inco~rated in the dependent variable. The FYC regression coefficient can be interpreted directly, since both FYC and NORTH are expressed in percentage terms. Thus, a one percent change in per capita GNP is associated with a 0.22 percent change in the incumbent party’s share of the total vote. The R-square of 0.6 1 is large given the many other factors that no doubt influenced presidential voting in the

LARRYL. WADE

283

TABLE 2. 1828-1940

Coefficient

Standard Standard error coefficient

t

p (2-tail)

0.23 4.72 1.39 -0.31

0.82 0.00 0.18 0.76

NA TION Constant Fyc Realign Popularity

11.07 0.21 2.77 -0.01

48.10 0.04 1.99 0.03

N= 23; R-square=0.55; standard error=4.10; Durbin-Watson = 1.74.

0.00 0.74 0.22 - 0.05

F-ratio= 7.6; p= 0.002;

SOUTH Constant Fyc Realign Popularity

- 102.07 0.22 3.01 0.05

N=21; R-square=0.21; Durbin-Watson = 2.33.

114.30 0.11 5.21 0.06

standard error=9.64;

0.00 0.45 0.13 0.19

- 0.89 1.97 0.58 0.85

0.38 0.07 0.57 0.41

F-ratio= 1.49; p=O.25;

NORTH Constant FYC Realign Popularity

88.09 0.22 4.30 - 0.05

49.02 0.05 2.03 0.03

N= 23; R-square=0.61; standard error=4.18; Durbin-Watson = 1.24.

0.00 0.72 0.31 -0.27

1.80 4.95 2.12 - 1.87

0.09 0.00 0.05 0.08

F-ratio= 10.06; p=O.OO;

WEST Constant FYC Realign Popularity N= 14; R-square=0.27; Durbin-Watson= 2.14.

427.85 0.24 14.16 -0.23

394.65 0.19 9.82 0.21

0.00 0.37 0.42 - 0.30

1.08 1.26 1.44 - 1.10

0.30 0.24 0.18 0.30

standard error= 15.13; F-ratio= 1.25; p=O.34;

North over the 112-year period involved. A bivariate model in which NORTH is regressed against FYC shows no significant

autocorrelation, a regression coefficient of 0.21 with a t-statistic of 4.26, and a R-square of 0.46. A single anomaly emerges: the election of 1932 has undue influence on, and therefore exaggerates, the multiple r (leverage = 0.43), an influence that is removed in the multivariate model. Thus, FYC is a robust predictor of voting, as required by any possible limitations of the economic data. It may be concluded that the model is adequately specified and that short-term change in per capita business activity was an important influence on presidential voting in the North from 1828 to 1940. Inspection of the residuals identifies several elections in which an increase in the business index was accompanied by a loss of vote-share for the incumbent party. In two of these elections (18 5 2 and 1900), the loss of votes was small (about two percent), while the gain in the business index was of the order of 10-l 1 percent. McKinley’s fate was not affected in

284

~ec~~~~~~~dperiodic ~~~~~en~~s 011econamic

ziutitsg

ia

US ~~~s~~~~~~~ eir?ctions

1900, but Winfield Scott lost the White House for the Whigs in 1852 with the election of the Democrat, Franklin Pierce. In 1848, a small increase in business activity (two percent) did not prevent a loss of vote-share of over eight percent and another transfer of party power when Zachary Taylor defeated the Democrat, Lewis Cass. In 1724, the Republicans lost 10 percent of their vote-share in spite of a six percent improvement in the business index. but of course retained the presidency with the election of Calvin Coolidge (LaFollette’s Progressive party campaign was presumably partly responsible). In 1892, a gain in the business index of three percent was associated with a marginal loss of vote share (0.8 percent), and in this case there was a change in parry control of the executive branch when Grover Cleveland defeated the incumbent Republican, Benjamin Harrison. (Here again, a third-party candidate, the Populist Weaver, surely contributed to this resuit.j Finally, the business index improved five percent from 1736 to 1940, but Roosevelt lost nearly six percent of his share of the total Northern vote. It is necessary to keep in mind that the South and West also contributed to these electoral outcomes, so it is not suggested that Northern voting aione accounted for the changes in party control mentioned above. What can be observed+ however, is that an opposition party seeking to capture a White House that had presided over ‘good times’ did not face an impossible situation, merely a very difficult one, turning out the incumbent party on only three occasions. It is noteworthy also that these mis-predicted cases are scattered throughout the 1828-1940 period, but as suggested in the full-term equations, become concentrated after Worfd War Il. The basis for a two-period analysis appears not oniy conceptually but empiricdly sound. From f748 to 1984, the signs for FYC and NATION are inconsistent with a naive prediction in six of nine elections. If one-year change in the business index is chosen, the results are also inconsistent in six cases (four overlap with FYC). However, with two-year change only two of the nine cases are deviant. Partly for this reason, the results reported here cannot be said to invalidate other studies; different specifications of dependent variables and different economic series also no doubt explain differences in findings.

Conclusion The main conclusions to be drawn from the results in the previous section are given below. First, the presumption that short-term economic events have inff uenced presidential voting mure in some geographical sections and historicat periods than in others is consistent with the results of the regression analyses. For reasons developed above, the historically very different electoral arrangements and politico-economic systems found in the North, South and West seem to have had a profound impact on the expression of short-term economic voting. In the North, the party system aggregated such sentiment reasonably efficiently for over one hundred years, a situation that was not true of the South or the West. These effects are shown in clear relief when sectional and periodic controls are imposed on national voting trends. In effect, three different versions of the two-party system operated in three regions with quite different economic, and hence politicai, interests. For many years, voters in the Northern core behaved as the economic theory of voting would predict, while those in the Southern and Western peripheries did nat. In the context of different electoral systems, party arrangements and poiitical cultures, and located differently with respect to national economic events. Southern and Western voters responded to voting cues other than shortterm fluctuations in what was, arguably (Agnew, 1987), a national economy that until the 1930s served largely Northern interests. While these effects persisted for the larger part of the history of popular presidential deteriorated rapidly in the post-World voting- from the 1820s through the 193Os-they

LARRY L. WADE

285

War II period. The reasons for the behavior of the error terms from the late 1940s to the present are no doubt multiple and complex, although some possible factors were advanced earlier. A tendency toward economic convergence among the regions has occurred; sectional voting, although alive and well, has deciined somewhat and has taken on different patterns, especially with the collapse of the one-party South and the mobilization of its black electorate; political parties appear to have been altered in voters’ perceptions as competitive teams as the rise of television encouraged personality-centered presidential contests; and a nuclear, bi-polar, and post-industrial world introduced new issues into presidential politics, often to dominate short-term economic performance in importance. Population growth in the South and West-in the regions of historically less short-term economic voting-may also have influenced the national aggregates. It is also possible that higher incomes and greater income-security reduced the salience of economic fluctuations for many voters. Evidence has also been presented on behalf of the view that voters, when non-economic concerns do not dominate and when given an opportunity to express electoral evaluations, as seems to have been true in the North for an extended period, did not discount the economy nearly as greatly as suggested in other longitudinal studies of presidential voting, e.g., those of Fair (1978) and Kirchgassner (198 1). On the contrary, for decades Northern voters seem to have ‘looked back’ and evaluated the full four-year peformance of the incumbent presidential party in arriving at their voting decisions, very much as an optimistic theory of rational voting would suggest. Of course, it is possible that contemporary voters are more myopic or, what comes to the same thing, more impatient, than their ancestors. Although there are very real limitations to the amount of information that can be gleaned from aggregate time-series data of the sort considered here, it appears that the data are sufficiently reliable to use in the modeling of economic voting in presidential elections over a considerably longer time period than heretofore considered. There are also good reasons for suggesting that statistical models of economic voting and national elections will benefit from the incorporation of sectional and, in longitudinal studies, periodic controls. The viabihty of the Archer/Taylor geographical classification for use in other empirical studies of American voting appears vindicated. Short-term Downsian processes are unambiguously present when the institutional structures which Downs identified are approximated in the world of real politics, and when other issues do not arise to eclipse their expression. By the same token, it is necessary to be alert to those circumstances in which local party arrangements and non-economic or structural-economic issues submerge or obliterate short-term economic voting. With respect to further research, it would be useful to know just how Northern voters over the 1828-1940 period came to their apparently rather accurate understanding of economic fluctuations. In the absence of information now provided by national-income accounting and the monthly and quarterly tracking of nation-wide employment and income trends by the mass media, less myopic voting might have been fostered. Longer periods of economic fluctuations, such as those identified here, may have been both personally experienced and observed in one’s local environment, as well as conveyed by the press and political campaigns. These would not have been presented as precise statistical summaries of changes in national economic activity, but as retrospective impressions of improvements or declines in general business and employment opportunities, of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ times. If so, it wouId be ironic if a lack of current and accurate economic ~nfo~ation encouraged Northern voters to evaluate the full-term performance of the incumbent presidential party, just as some advocates of democracy would wish.

Sectional and periodic infhences

286

on economic

voting in U.S. presidential elections

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