%T Reassessing the Link between Voter Heterogeneity and Political
Accountability: A Latent Class Regression Model of Economic
Voting
%A Jonathan N. Katz
%A Gabriel Katz
%X While recent research has underscored the conditioning effect of individual characteristics on economic voting behavior, most empirical studies have failed to explicitly incorporate observed heterogeneity into statistical analyses linking citizens' economic evaluations to electoral choices. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a latent
class regression model to jointly analyze the determinants and influence of economic
voting in Presidential and Congressional elections. Our modeling approach allows us to
better describe the effects of individual covariates on economic voting and to test hypotheses on the existence of heterogeneous types of voters, providing an empirical basis
for assessing the relative validity of alternative explanations proposed in the literature.
Using survey data from the 2004 U.S. Presidential, Senate and House elections, we
and that voters with college education and those more interested in political campaigns
based their vote on factors other than their economic perceptions. In contrast, less educated and interested respondents assigned considerable weight to economic assessments,
with sociotropic jugdgments strongly in
uencing their vote in the Presidential election
and personal financial considerations affecting their vote in House elections. We conclude that the main distinction in the 2004 election was not between `sociotropic' and
`pocketbook' voters, but rather between `economic' and `non-economic' voters.
%D 2009
%L eprints89