Economics and Politics in the 1984 American Presidential Election

Citizens are attentive to economic conditions and reach political evaluations partly on that basis--but how do they do so? Treating the 1984 presidential election as a convenient case and being equipped with survey measures tailored exactly to the issues at hand, we examined three possibilities: that voters care most about their own economic well-being (the pocketbook hypothesis), that they are concerned primarily with the economic well-being of their group (the group hypothesis), or that they are preoccupied with the economic condition of the country (the sociotropic hypothesis). We found that person, group, and nation constitute related but distinct arenas of economic assessments and that, by a wide margin, assessments of national economic well-being mattered most to voters' decisions in 1984. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications of these results for understanding elections and by arguing for a broadened conception of voting based on incumbent performance.