"Right now, do you think that economic conditions in the country as a whole are getting better or getting worse?" Gallup1 has been asking this same question for decades. This question is one of the few economic expectation questions that is repeatedly asked to survey participants along with direct political identification questions such as party identification or voter intention. The answers are highly correlated with voter preferences. Around elections in which the presidency changes parties (e.g., 2000, 2008, and 2016), the percentage of people answering "better" soars for the party coming into power and plummets for the party leaving power, with movements as great as 25 percentage points in the days before and after the election (Krupenkin, Hill, and Rothschild 2018).What does this question about economic conditions capture? First, what are people thinking about when they give an answer regarding economic conditions "as a whole": are they thinking about themselves (i.e., pocketbook) or national economic indicators (i.e., sociotropic)? Second, are respondents shifting their answers to signal something about their party (i.e., partisan cheer-leading) and/or do they shift their economic decision-making due to these beliefs?
展开▼
