Changing Taxes, Changing Votes, Changing Elections.

Both pooled aggregate analysis of the American states (Kone and Winters, 1993) and cross-sectional individual-level analysis of election exit polls in the states (Niemi et al., 1995) established weak negative impacts of changing taxes on subsequent vote outcomes and voter behavior. Our research investigates the impact of legislated changes in the sales, income, and "sin" taxes on individual voting using exit polls from 43 states in 228 elections from 1982-2000 yielding about 315,000 respondents. We hypothesize conditions that affect the tax-vote linkage. We find stronger negative effects of changes in the sales tax on vote choice, but little or no impact of changes in either the income or sin taxes. Some other non-obvious findings of the paper include: Republican candidates defending tax records do worse than Democratic candidates, a trait that appears concentrated among open seat Republicans. By decomposing into types of taxes changed, it appears that Republicans are particularly sensitive to sales tax changes, especially if an incumbent, and open seat Republicans to their party-predecessor's income tax changes. Of the impact of tax changes on voters, there appears to be little variation in the impact of tax changes on lower or upper income classes nor by party identification of the voter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]