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The American Political Science Review, 65, 1 (March, 1971), 131–143.
George Stigler has taken issue with this conclusion in “General Economic Conditions and National Elections” presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, 1972 (Toronto). Some weaknesses in Stigler's counter-evidence are pointed out by Arthur Okun in his “Comment on Stigler's Paper,” presented at the same session.
Kramer's data was used for all variables except the “responsive indexes.” See Appendix B in Kramer,op. cit., for a description of the data and original data sources.
Independent and unpublished work by Duncan MacRae and by William Niskanen confirm positive responses to growth in real income. MacRae found negative responses to inflation and to increases in unemployment; Niskanen found these responses to be insignificant.
Arthur Okun, “Potential GNP: Its Measurement and Significance,” 1962Proceedings of the Business and Economic Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association.
George L. Perry,Unemployment, Money Wage Rates, and Inflation, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, pp. 61–63.
Perry himself has analyzed demographic reasons for such an adverse shift, in his article “Changing Labor Markets and Inflation,”Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1970, 3. Dynamic models of price and wage interaction also seem to provide an explanation. It is very likely that both sets of forces were at work.
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The research described in this paper was carried out under grants from the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation. A preliminary version of this paper was presented to 1968 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. The author is grateful to Ronald Bodkin, Joseph B. Kadane, and Gerald H. Kramer for helpful discussions of the preliminary version and to her research assistants Paul Applegarth and Donald Wilson for diligent data gathering and processing. Her colleagues Alvin Klevorick and Jon K. Peck made many useful suggestions during the revision. Peck was especially helpful with the analysis in the statistical appendix.
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Lepper, S.J. Voting behavior and aggregate policy targets. Public Choice 18, 67–81 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718497
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01718497