Economic voting : a campaign-centered theory

"In this study I explain why economic voting is so widespread and, yet, why incumbents so often win amidst economic downturns and challengers in boom times. I account for the fact that some candidates drastically outperform the predictions of economic voting models while others underperform. More than just accounting for seemingly anomalous elections, I also explain the conditions under which incumbents win in good times and lose in bad times. To do so, I deviate from the existing approach and develop a campaign-centered theory that highlights the power of candidates to alter the strength of the economic vote strategically. argue that the conventional wisdom fails for two reasons. First, it leaves no room for political leadership. By contrast, I show that candidates wield immense power over the strength of the economic vote via political communication. Candidates and their strategists are not passive observers of a structurally- determined political fate. Campaigners across the globe spend millions of dollars crafting their communications strategy and honing a message that will make certain issues salient in public discourse and shift others to the back burner. In short, they battle to define what each election is about, and recent evidence suggests that these efforts may be successful. One of the most important findings to come out of the renewed interest in media and campaign effects in the last twenty years is that political communications can "prime," or raise the salience of, certain issues in the minds of voters. These findings, however, have not been incorporated into the vast literature on economic voting."