The forthcoming article “You and whose economy? Group-based retrospection in economic voting” by Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard is summarized by the author below.
The economy plays a major role in elections, and decades of research suggest that voters are predominantly sociotropic, focusing on the national economy when evaluating incumbents. Yet, the dominance of sociotropic voting presents a puzzle. Citizens have diverse, often conflicting interests, and political leaders inevitably align with some groups in society over others. Ignoring these distributional conflicts seems at odds with what we know about voter behavior: that social group memberships profoundly shape how people think about politics and that voters care about group interests.
In this paper, I address this puzzle and argue that voters sanction incumbents for the economic performance of their own social in-groups, beyond the nation as a whole and their own pocketbooks. Group-level economic trends offer a more reliable signal than individual circumstances about whether the incumbent’s economic management serves group members’ interests. Importantly, I theorize that voters are especially sensitive to how their groups perform relative to the national trend: they punish incumbents when their groups fall behind a growing economy and reward them when their groups outperform a struggling one. This “group-based retrospective voting” thus introduces important limits to sociotropic voting.
Isolating the effect of group-level economic conditions is difficult. Existing studies of, e.g., local economic voting have mostly relied on observational cross-sectional comparisons that face two key challenges. First, group economic outcomes are endogenous, as incumbents may strategically favor pre-existing supporters. Second, even if this relationship were causal, it is unclear whether voters care specifically about group performance or are simply responding to their own improved finances (pocketbook voting) or using local conditions as a signal of broader national trends (sociotropic voting).
To overcome these problems, I test the theory using two complementary approaches. First, I analyze British panel survey data showing that changes in the economic performance of class and regional in-groups predict changes in incumbent support, holding sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations constant. Second, I conduct three pre-registered experiments in Denmark and the United States, randomizing true economic information about 34 different social groups. The experimental results consistently show that voters respond more strongly to economic information about their own group, especially when their group’s performance diverges from the national trend.
These findings help explain patterns of economic voting that don’t fit standard sociotropic models, such as why economically secure voters sometimes support populist movements, or why strong national growth doesn’t always translate into incumbent support. They also have implications for electoral accountability, suggesting that incumbents can build electoral support by favoring pivotal groups over national growth.
About the author: Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. Their research “You and whose economy? Group-based retrospection in economic voting” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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