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If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of [...]

The usual model of electoral reaction to economic conditions assumes the 'retrospective' economic voter who bases expectations solely on recent economic performance or personal economic experience (voter as 'peasant'). A second model assumes a 'sophisticated' economic voter who incorporates new information about the future into personal economic expectations (voter as 'banker'). Using the components, both retrospective and prospective, of the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) as intervening variables between economic conditions and approval, we find that the prospective component fully accounts for the presidential approval time series. With aggregate consumer expectations about long-term business conditions in the approval equation, neither the usual economic indicators not the other ICS components matter. Moreover, short-term changes in consumer expectations respond more to current forecasts than to the current economy. The qualitative result is a rational expectations outcome: the electorate anticipates the economic future and rewards or punishes the president for economic events before they happen.

MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson used quarterly Gallup poll data to show in this Review in 1989 that changing levels of macropartisanship, the two-party division of partisans, responded to presidential approval ratings and perceptions of the economy and predicted national election results. In a 1991 Review research note Abramson and Ostrom argued that the NES and GSS questions more commonly used by scholars generated macropartisanship measures less sensitive to short term factors and less predictive of election outcomes. In this Controversy, Erikson and Stimson respond to the challenge and present new data from CBS News and New York Times telephone surveys to buttress their earlier analyses, arguing against substantial effects of the different question wordings. Abramson and Ostrom explain their continuing reservations.

We present a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in US. [...]

The article presents a commentary on the article "Constituency Influence in Congress," by Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, which appeared in the previous issue. It is inferred that with a seemingly out-of-equilibrium result, U.S. Congressmen feel that their individual legislative actions may have considerable effect on the electorate. Miller and Stokes saw the tendency of members of Congress to have an inflated sense of their visibility to the voting public.