RETROSPECTIVE VOTING

Nonetheless, voters do attempt to make candidate evaluations, and how they reach those imperfect judgments varies considerably from one election to the next. The most widely studied race of them all—the presidential election—appears to trigger a special form of candidate evaluation. In presidential elections, citizens often engage in what Morris Fiorina has called "retrospective voting." Many Americans evaluate presidential incumbents based on the actual condition of the nation. In addition to taking into account candidate issue stands and their promises for the future, voters take a hard look at what they have experienced under the president's administration before deciding whether

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to reelect.^[18] To take an extreme example, an event such as the Great Depression can doom a president's chances of reelection no matter how artful a dodger that politician may be. Though much modern presidential advertising threatens to mislead or even deceive unwary voters, it appears that the electorate selects presidents partly based on the state of the economy, among other "hard data." To paraphrase the famous sign posted in the Clinton campaign headquarters in 1992, it is, indeed, the economy, stupid.

Once again, such voting behavior is the exception. Fiorina argues that the retrospective voting model does not work very well outside of the presidential election. In his view, the model's weakness stems from the decline of political parties in America. He cites the example of the 1978 elections, before which the Democratic Party held power in both the White House and on Capitol Hill. In that year's congressional elections, voters' ratings of Democratic incumbents depended "only weakly and erratically" on perceptions of government's success at addressing "inflation, unemployment, or anything else of a programmatic nature."^[19]

More important, crude retrospective voting is usually an ineffective method of candidate evaluation. If a voter looks at the condition of the local or national economy and judges candidates on that basis, the voter is using an objective but not necessarily relevant piece of information. Forces beyond the control of public officials cause most economic shifts, and an incumbent may deserve no credit or blame for one's fortunes. Presidents can have a noticeable short-term economic impact, and economists have named such election-year tinkering "the political business cycle." If successful, the president might trigger a brief spurt of economic growth, but voting based on that short-term change would be a mistake.

Even when voters more broadly judge the incumbent's overall performance, few know much about the actual performance of most of their public officials. Some voters may judge presidents based on overall economic trends, but how many voters have solid indicators of the performance of state legislators, judges, school board members, and secretaries of state?^[20] A

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study of the perceptions of city and county services in Kentucky found evidence of considerable error in citizen evaluations of the local government: citizens sometimes associated nongovernmental functions with public institutions, they sometimes attributed functions to the wrong institution, and they often failed to recognize some of the functions that local government performed.^[21] A study of gubernatorial elections found similar signs of misjudgment: idiosyncratic voter perceptions of the economy signiflcantly influenced vote choices, but there was no relationship between actual economic indicators and electoral outcomes.^[22]

Nonetheless, there is evidence that voters sometimes make accurate connections between legislators' actions and real short-term policy outcomes. The congressional scholar Douglas Arnold describes these linkages in detail in The Logic of Congressional Action. In Arnold's view, a representative's action is "traceable" when "a citizen can plausibly trace an observed effect first back to a governmental action and then back to a representative's individual contribution." Relatively few effects are traceable; most go unnoticed by stakeholders, have multiple interconnected causes, or have little visible impact on individual constituents. With the aid of concerned interest groups, however, citizens do sometimes trace connections between individual representatives and speciflc outcomes. This potential for citizen oversight prevents career-minded legislators from enacting disastrous policies that would cause unnecessary and immediate harm to their constituents.^[23]

Unfortunately, Arnold points out how this same process results in the avoidance of good legislation and the passage of unsound bills. Because citizens only notice short-term negative impacts on their own lives, "legislators' fear of retrospective voting impels them to avoid … politically infeasible policies," including some proposals that would produce good long-term outcomes. Instead, legislators look for "politically attractive policies" that appear to have the same beneflts (in the short run) but "spread the costs more widely, impose them as later-order effects, or push them further into the future." When casting about for such an alternative, representatives sometimes run into "politically compelling policies" whose "intended effects are popular, irrespective of whether the proposed means will really achieve those ends." Meanwhile, legislators tend to avoid "politically repellent options" because citizens either fail to see how the instruments could bring about the desired effects (e.g., subtle economic incentive mechanisms) or provide beneflts only to disliked or marginalized social groups. Overall, "to the extent that citizens are poor policy analysts, they may obtain policy instruments they favor but fail to get the policy outcomes they really want because their chosen instruments are incapable of producing the desired effect.^[24]

In sum, retrospective voting does occur in relatively high-proflle elections. At first, this approach to electoral decision making appears to flt the ideal model outlined in chapter 2: voters assess the performance of

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incumbents and reward only those who serve the public's interest. As it is practiced, though, retrospective voting is a flawed and even counterproductive method of candidate evaluation. Those voters who do make cognitive connections from the past (objective macroeconomic indicators, personal economic experiences, and other perceived indicators of incumbent performance) in their voting choices often make faulty and unreliable linkages. Retrospective voters often misjudge short-term impacts, misplace responsibility for those outcomes, and overlook longterm impacts. As a result, these voters routinely misjudge incumbents' ability and willingness to represent their interests in office. Candidate selection errors are even more likely when retrospective voting based on incumbent performance becomes "a choice for or against the incumbent" without regard to the challenger.^[25] If a voter knows nothing of the challenger in a race, simply "throwing out the bum" becomes a dangerous gamble.