(Re)Considering the Sources of Economic Perceptions

Abstract

ObjectiveDo voters hold accurate perceptions about economic conditions and what factors drive those perceptions? Some work suggests that voters are too hopelessly biased by partisanship or other commitments to be able to develop accurate perceptions of the economy upon which to base judgments of incumbent performance (Evans and Andersen, 2006). By contrast, other work shows that voters do a good job of developing accurate perceptions about economic conditions in which partisan bias is a minor influence (Lewis‐Beck et al., 2013).MethodsThe research note draws on a pooled data set of Canadian Election Studies from nine national elections for the period 1988–2015 to explore the relative influence of both approaches using multilevel modeling.ResultsFindings indicate evidence for both camps: partisan bias does exert some independent influence on shaping national economic evaluations and national economic evaluations reflect actual real‐world economic conditions.ConclusionsImplications of these results suggest that economic perceptions have mixed origins that lend some, not insignificant, support to the claim that economic voting remains a viable scholarly enterprise.