The meaning and use of subjective perceptions in studies of economic voting

In this essay, we discuss the usefulness and meaning of empirical models of economic voting that rely on measures of individual economic perceptions. The effort is motivated by the recent reappearance of a long-standing critique of the use of economic perceptions data in individual level economic voting studies, with a consequent call for the use of aggregate data, which suggests that variation in perceptions must reflect noise or error because there can be only one “real” state of the national economy applicable to all respondents in any national survey. We show, however, that this critique (and its corresponding prescriptions for how to specify empirical models of economic voting) is based on a misunderstanding about (1) the theoretical concepts called for by the leading theories of economic voting (and that we should be trying to measure), (2) the nature of the economy that individuals can actually observe (it is a distribution of possible states, not a point) and, consequently, (3) the interpretation of correlations between individual economic perceptions and electoral support.