Aggregate Vote Functions for the U.S. Presidency, Senate, and House

Abstract

In this paper, we estimate vote functions for presidential, House, and Senate elections in the United States using a seemingly unrelated regressions technique adapted to the case of unequal numbers of observations across equations. Our method facilitates rigorous comparisons of voting behavior across election types and provides efficiency gains over ordinary least squares. Our analysis focuses on comparisons across vote functions. We find that: (1) economic variables appear to influence outcomes in all election types, but they are more important in presidential elections than in House or Senate elections; (2) the hypothesis that voters attach equal relative weights to inflation and growth across election types cannot be rejected; (3) incumbency power affects both Senate and House elections but is more important in the House; (4) mid-term effects in House and Senate elections represent a penalty for the party controlling the presidency.