An Experimental Approach to Economic Voting

The relationship between economic conditions and political behavior has received great attention for several decades. While it is widely accepted that incumbents are more likely to get reelected when the economy performs better, some methodological challenges have made it difficult to test this theory on survey data. This article reports on a series of studies that manipulate individual assessments of economic conditions, and use the downstream of these experiments to identify the causal effect of those assessments on presidential approval. Our findings suggest that changes in voter’s perceptions of the economy indeed translate into substantial changes in political support for the president.