What Do Economic Models Really Tell Us About Elections?
Yesterday’s column on the weak historical relationship between the unemployment rate and presidential performance generated a mostly favorable reaction. But I also got a few replies wondering how to reconcile these findings against the claims, made with some frequency by political scientists, that presidential elections can be forecast with pinpoint accuracy provided that you know the economic fundamentals.
Might it be that the unemployment rate is the “wrong” variable? It has a couple of flaws. It tends to be more a lagging than a leading indicator. It affects a relatively small number of voters (although underemployment is another matter). There is ample room to critique the way that it is calculated, such as by excluding “discouraged workers” from the calculation, and it’s subject to reasonably large measurement errors.
Apart from the unemployment rate, the economic measures that we hear about most frequently are probably gross domestic product (G.D.P.) growth and inflation. Do either of these do a better job of forecasting elections?
Yes, but they still don’t do terribly well.
Here’s the comparison over the past 100 years of real (inflation-adjusted), per-capita G.D.P. growth over the course of the president’s term to performance of the incumbent party:
G.D.P. growth explains about 12 percent of election results. That’s something — but it still leaves 88 percent unexplained. If this was as well as we could do, the slogan “it’s the economy, stupid” might have to be revised to “sure, you’d rather have a better economy than a weaker one; it probably makes some difference at the margin” — which doesn’t make for a very good bumper sticker.
Roughly the same is true of the inflation rate:
However, this one is a little tricky because both high inflation and deflation have deleterious effects on the consumer. A quadratic curve does somewhat better than a straight-line estimate: low (but positive) inflation helps the incumbent president, while either deflation or high inflation hurt.
You can do a bit better still if you combine these measures. One relatively elegant method is to subtract the inflation rate from the per-capita G.D.P. growth rate. This explains about 43 percent of the variance in election results:
So we can breathe a sigh of relief. The economic fundamentals clearly do make some difference — quite a bit really.
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