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NO MAN IS AN ISLAND: SELF-INTEREST, THE PUBLIC INTEREST, AND SOCIOTROPIC VOTING

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08913811.2011.635868

1933-8007

D. Roderick Kiewiet, Michael S. Lewis‐Beck,

Social Policy and Reform Studies

ABSTRACT Four decades ago, Gerald Kramer showed that economic conditions affect electoral outcomes. Some researchers took this to mean that voters were self-interested, voting their "pocketbooks," while others, such as Leif Lewin, took it to mean that voters were sociotropic, motivated by the public interest—and therefore altruistic. It is important, however, to avoid conflating sociotropic voters with altruistic ones. Voters might be voting in favor of politicians or parties that they think will further the public interest as an indirect route to furthering their own interests, as members of the public. More research, perhaps conducted using novel methodologies, is needed in order to settle the extent to which voters are motivated by self-interest or by the public interest. Acknowledgments The authors thank Jeffrey Friedman, Sam Kernell, Nick Martini, David Sears, and Erik Snowberg for assistance, advice, and comments, and are forever in the debt of Jerry Kramer, who got this whole thing started. Notes 1. This is not to say that there is no evidence whatsoever for the proposition that individual voters are influenced by recent trends in their own economic circumstances. In most regressions involving the decision to support the incumbents, the estimated coefficient of the familiar "personal finances" indicator, although much smaller than that of the "national economic conditions" counterpart, is usually in the correct direction and is sometimes statistically significant. Kiewiet Citation1983 also shows that voters who had recently been unemployed gave more support to the Democrats, a pattern which it characterizes as policy-oriented as opposed to incumbency-oriented voting. Believing that unemployment is the most important problem facing the country, however, has a considerably larger impact upon voters' choices. 2. What Kramer actually said is that this is what voters should do if they are rational, but for present purposes we would rather not stray into the ongoing controversy as to what does and what does not constitute voter rationality. 3. According to Kramer, in this context the benefits of aggregation are substantial, the ecological fallacy notwithstanding. This is because aggregate measures of economic well-being average out idiosyncratic variation and, in contrast to the cross-sectional data, government-induced policies contribute heavily to it. A time-series regression yields somewhat attenuated estimates but is far less afflicted by statistical artifact than estimates based upon cross-sectional survey data. 4. Rationalization bias implies that partisanship affects perceptions of the economy, but it is a two-way street: Due either to cognitive consistency pressure or Bayesian updating, perceptions of the economy also alter partisanship (Fiorina 1981; Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, Elias Citation2008). 5. Ansolabehere et al. Citation2011 similarly argue that voters rely upon aggregate economic indicators as superior sources of information about the competence of the incumbent administration, and discount the very noisy signal that is their own economic circumstances. 6. The actual text of Donne's poem is: No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.