Economic Voting and Uncertainty

The notion that voters incorporate the economy in different ways into their voting calculus is well accepted in the electoral behavior literature (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2019). Much ink has been spelled on various questions such as whether voters decide based on retrospective or prospective economic evaluations and sociotropic or egocentric considerations (e.g., Lacy and Christenson 2017). Yet, the number of studies assessing how peoples’ certainty in their economic assessment moderates the relationship between economic evaluations and voting is limited (for the exception, see Dettrey and Palmer 2013). Political science research in the 1990s and early 2000s concluded that, in accordance with insights from psychology, peoples’ uncertainty in their own beliefs and attitudes are crucial to understand when and how they affect peoples’ behavior (e.g., Alvarez and Brehm 2002; Zaller 1992). In a seminal piece, Alvarez and Franklin state: “Citizens face an inherently uncertain political world yet they are nonetheless frequently called upon to make consequential political choices” (1994, 671). Against this background, we ask: How does uncertainty about sociotropic economic assessments effect economic voting?