Economic Voting and the “Symbolic Politics” Argument: A Reinterpretation and Synthesis

Economic voting is generally regarded as a straightforward political demand for the amelioration of economic grievances. This assumption about motives underlies the implicit theories of politicians and the imputations of interests to voters in aggregate time series models. Several recent articles have argued that voting is not self-interested but a manifestation of “symbolic” preferences at the level of the collectivity. This article places the dispute between personal and collective decision referents into the broader perspective of a multi-stage model of information processing and decision making. Personal and collective decision referents are shown to define the poles of a continuum, and several hypotheses are derived to predict the relative weights assigned to each in the voter's calculus. The model is used in analyses of both the public's evaluations of incumbent economic management and economic voting in different electoral arenas by varying issue publics. Designed to maximize comparability with aggregate studies, this research includes both objective and subjective measures of economic conditions and indexes changes in personal conditions over time from panel data.