There is a large literature analyzing the “instability problem” in economic voting, explaining why the economy’s effect on incumbent support varies across countries and within them over time. Within this well-trodden ground, Austin Hart’s book makes an important and novel contribution. While previous work has focused on structural conditions that obscure responsibility for economic policy choices or affect the economy’s salience, Hart focuses on the strategic choices that parties make to emphasize or deemphasize the economy. He argues that campaign messages that prime the economy lead voters to emphasize recent economic trends as they evaluate the incumbent party, while campaigns that do not touch on economic themes lead voters to focus their attention elsewhere. The implication is that if the election campaign does not emphasize economic management, the ruling party will not be held accountable for economic outcomes that occurred on their watch.
The primary evidence for this argument comes from case studies of two U.S. and two Mexican presidential elections. These cases compare elections where some or all candidates attempted to prime the economy to those where no candidates emphasized economic management in their messaging. In the 1992 U.S. presidential election, Bill Clinton famously focused his attention on economic outcomes under George H. W. Bush. In the 2006 Mexican presidential election, Felipe Calderón changed his strategy midway through the campaign to emphasize his party’s management of the economy and to raise concerns about how his rival, Andres Manuel López Obrador, would manage it. López Obrador and various civil-society actors subsequently focused on economic management in their messaging as well. In both of these cases, panel survey data reveal strong correspondence between voters’ evaluations of the economy and their support for the incumbent party. Within-case evidence links this behavior to exposure to economic-themed campaign ads. In the 1992 U.S. elections, the connection between economic perceptions and evaluations of the economy was weaker for voters who did not live in areas where Clinton advertised heavily. In the 2006 Mexican elections, the connection between economic perceptions and support for the incumbent party was weak in the period before the candidates shifted their attention to the economy.
Voting behavior was quite different in the two elections where no candidate emphasized the economy. In the 2000 U.S. election, for example, George W. Bush had few incentives to dwell on the strong economy, while Al Gore chose not to focus on the economy, in part because his internal research showed that few voters gave him credit for its recent growth. A similar pattern emerged in the 2000 Mexican elections, as no candidates emphasized the economy in their messaging. The main opposition candidates, Vincente Fox and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, focused their campaigns on the possibility of regime change generally and, in the case of Cárdenas, on social policy, while the incumbent party’s candidate, Francisco Labastida, emphasized his ability to make his party more democratic and responsive. Content analyses of campaign advertisements in both cases confirm that economic appeals made up a small portion of the ads aired that cycle, and survey data show that economic perceptions had weak associations with voter choices in both races.
These four case studies are supplemented with shorter descriptions of campaign strategies and voter behavior in South Korea, West Germany, and Canada that show how economic voting was weaker in cases where candidates explicitly focused on noneconomic issues. Hart also looks at whether differences in estimated economic voting levels in the United States over the 1976–2004 period correspond to the weight that economic appeals received in the ads leading up to the election. All of these data points suggest that candidate messaging can activate or deactivate the economic vote.
The scope of Hart’s study is impressive and unique. The analysis of campaigns from the United States alongside those from other countries is especially noteworthy. Far too often, discussions of campaign effects and public opinion dynamics in the United States do not take into account the lessons that could be learned by looking at similar dynamics in other countries. The four main case studies are richly analyzed. Panel data are used to minimize concerns about endogeneity and also to isolate the timing of opinion changes that can be matched to changes in campaign strategy. Systematic content analyses of campaign advertisement themes buttress the qualitative descriptions of campaigns’ strategic choices. Then, for the case of the 2006 elections in Mexico, Hart directly tests the implied individual-level mechanism by looking at whether advertising exposure is associated with citizens perceiving management as the most important issue in the election. Economic Voting is also well written, with the cases presented in such a way that a reader who is not a specialist in any of the cases will find them engaging, while specialists on U.S. or Mexican politics will still find novel insights in the analyses.
The book establishes that campaigns can and do shape economic accountability. It does not, however, identify limits on campaigns’ abilities to reshape the electorate’s agenda. Yet not all attempts to prime an issue are successful. In the 2006 Mexican election that Hart analyzes, for example, Calderón’s initial attempt to focus the electorate’s attention on corruption did not gain traction with the voters. It is unclear why this frame did not resonate while an economic performance frame did. Elections where candidates offer competing frames, with one emphasizing the economy and the other deemphasizing it, such as in the 1992 U.S. election, also raise questions about why one framing effort is the more successful. While this author shows that candidate messages can activate economic voting and thus merit further study in this context, further work on the conditions under which they can have this effect is needed. Specifically, I wonder whether voters should be brought back into the story as agents, choosing to respond to campaign appeals that bring them back to their core concerns, or if voters instead passively accept whatever agenda candidates lay out.
The role of structural factors in constraining priming choices is also left largely unexplored in the present analysis. While the elections analyzed by Hart include both strong and weak economies, it is unclear how much leverage candidates can have following a true crisis. As John McCain’s pollster Bill McInturff said about campaign strategy after the Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008, “The campaign implodes. There is no campaign anymore. There is only the economic crisis in America, and what you want to say about [it]” (Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government. Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2008, p. 204). During periods of war, during a deep recession, or after extreme violence, politicians may be less able to shift the public agenda than in politically normal times similar to those explored in this book.
I also wanted to know more about whether the effectiveness of accountability priming differs within the electorate. Other studies find that certain groups are predisposed to focus on economic issues, compared to other issue publics with alternative concerns. Do activating campaigns affect the behavior of all of these groups? If not, these distinct, motivated issue publics might limit the ability of candidates to deflect or focus accountability. Further subgroup analysis into voters who changed their behavior and emphasized the economy after being exposed to a priming message would have clarified how much control parties have over the agenda.
Finally, this book leaves unanswered one of the questions that it uses to motivate the analysis: Do differences in campaign styles explain how the economy’s effect varies across countries? Is the effect of campaign strategies larger than the effect of structural variables (clarity of responsibility, globalization, etc.) that previous studies emphasize? The limiting factor is likely a lack of reliable, comparable measures of campaign messages. Hopefully this book can motivate further work to reliably measure campaign content cross-nationally in order to answer these questions.
These open questions, however, should not overshadow the importance of what Hart has accomplished in this book. It provides clear evidence that campaigns matter and that candidates can and do shape accountability processes. It also is an example of cross-national campaign analyses that should be emulated. And it raises important questions about whether incumbent candidates can shirk accountability and the importance of meaningful opposition parties to focus the electorate on key elements of incumbent performance. Students of campaign effects or electoral accountability will learn much from Economic Voting and should continue to develop the themes that Hart lays out in it.
