Retrospective Voting: Who Are Retrospective Voters and Does it Matter if the Incumbent President is Running

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2009
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Haverford College. Department of Economics
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Prior literature on retrospective voting mostly focused on creating a model that accurately predicts the winner of an election. Very little research was done on who these retrospective voters are and if retrospective voting differed if the President ran in the election. This paper investigates whether the incumbent President running as a candidate in the election affected the extent and the way voters use methods of retrospective voting. It also seeks to investigate who these retrospective voters are and if there is a difference between which voters vote based on personal financial situation and which voters vote based on median household income growth. I ran three sets of logistic regressions using data from the American National Election Survey from 1968 to 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau’s Historical Income Tables, and the University of California Santa Barbara’s Presidency Project. From the regressions, I found that the President was held more accountable than other incumbent party candidates. I also found out that there is a difference between which voters vote based on personal financial situation and which voters vote based on median household income growth, and even these variations vary by election year.
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