Perhaps this is because, unlike incumbents, successors are not considered to have had personal power over policies that might have affected the national conditions leading up to the election."
RETROSPECTIVE VOTING MEANING FULL
As the incumbent, President Clinton would have received the full credit for the conditions that most voters regarded as being quite positive in the 2000 election.Ĭampbell explains, "From the end of World War II right up until today, voters assigned only partial credit or blame for national conditions to in-party successor candidates. For example, Al Gore received only part of the credit for what most voters saw as good times in the 2000 election. With his low approval ratings, Bush would already have been far behind Obama even before the economic crisis hit, according to Campbell's theory of conditional retrospective voting.īy the same token, when times are good, the successor candidate only gets part of the credit that would have gone to the incumbent. McCain was in a tight race with Obama until the Wall Street meltdown hit in mid-September of 2008. Bush would have been treated more roughly by the voters than they treated Sen. Voters unhappy with an incumbent do not "take it out" on a successor candidate of the same party to the same degree as they would on the incumbent he were running.įor example, in 2008 President George W. His study found that voters do not respond to a successor candidate in the same way as they respond to an incumbent. The theory of retrospective voting holds that (as well-known political commentator and public intellectual Walter Lippman wrote) the essence of popular government is "to support the Ins when things are going well (and) to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly.…"Ĭampbell notes, however, that things are not quite as simple as Lippman described. Campbell, PhD, professor and chair of the UB Department of Political Science.Ĭlick here to see a video interview with Campbell about his findings. The authors include noted researcher James E.
The research, "The Theory of Conditional Retrospective Voting: Does the Presidential Record Matter Less in Open-Seat Elections," is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Politics (Cambridge University Press). The study supports the theory of conditional retrospective voting, which holds that in such elections, voters are more likely to give consideration to national conditions when evaluating an incumbent seeking re-election than when considering a successor candidate from the incumbent's party.
A new study by researchers at the University at Buffalo modifies the longstanding theory of "retrospective voting," which holds that in presidential elections voters happy with the in-party's performance will support its candidate and when unhappy are more likely to support the opposition party's candidate.
0 kommentar(er)
