How does the economy shape policy preferences?

How do changes in the economy translate into shifts in aggregate preferences for a more or less activist government in the U.S.—a construct referred to as “policy mood”? Existing theories pose alternative explanations based on either a Maslow Hierarchy of Needs model, where citizens prefer an activist federal government to expand the social safety net when the economic future looks bright (Durr, 1993), or a Phillips Curve model (Erikson et al., 2002), in which the objective economic maladies of inflation and unemployment drive policy mood. We show that neither of these explanations withstands empirical scrutiny when analysis is extended beyond the time period of the original authors' work, suggest the existing wisdom tying the economy to policy mood is wrong, and offer some alternative avenues to pursue in search of an answer to the question: What moves policy mood?     

Media Consumption and the Dynamics of Policy Mood

Research has detailed the potential link between exposure to the mass media and the process of developing attitudes. Less examined, however, are the consequences of differing levels of media consumption on the nature of attitudes at both the individual and aggregate levels. This paper assesses the relationship between media consumption and public opinion in the U.S. (expressed through the macro concept of Policy Mood and an analogous micro concept we call policy liberalism). At the individual level, we find that increased levels of newspaper readership reduce variance in opinion, but that increased levels of television viewership do not. At the aggregate level, our results show that the opinions of media-consuming subgroups move in parallel for the most part, with similar causal dynamics. A slight exception to this parallelism lies with those who barely, if ever, read newspapers.     

Motivated Reasoning,Public Opinion,and Presidential Approval

Political Behavior - Presidential approval is a desirable commodity for US presidents, one that bolsters re-election chances and the prospects of legislative success. An important question, then,...     

The heterogeneity of consumer sentiment in an increasingly homogenous global economy

Recent investigations concerning consumer confidence in the U.S. have shed light on both the economic and political forces that contribute to its dynamics. And yet, as the recent financial crisis makes clear, the world economy is an increasingly interdependent place. This paper explores whether, in fact, consumer confidence responds differently to economic events in different political and institutional contexts. Our preliminary findings indicate that consumer confidence has shared variance in four countries for which we have data, but also unique variance with origins in national politics.     

The Political (and Economic) Origins of Consumer Confidence

Economic conditions, the story usually goes, influence consumer confidence, which in turn influences both political evaluations and votes. But we have little sense of the origins of consumer confidence itself. It is generally assumed that monthly reports of the nation's level of consumer confidence respond to objective economic conditions. We argue that politics is important for understanding consumer sentiment beyond what we know from economic conditions. Specifically, we demonstrate a direct effect of political evaluations of the president's management of the economy, the party of the president, extraordinary political events, and monetary policy, as well as an indirect effect of media coverage of the economy, on consumer sentiment, after controlling for economic conditions. When news coverage is positive, citizens give favorable evaluations, leading to more positive sentiment. Our findings suggest that understanding the political economy requires an emphasis on the causal effect of politics as well as economics.