So, who's your favourite candidate?
With Your Dearest Interests at Heart
Careful what you promise during an election campaign: you might get elected. Or not. That, as research by Panu Poutvaara and his colleagues Mikael Elinder and Henrik Jordahl shows, depends both on what you promise and your degree of credibility.
If you promise to hit the wallet of prospective voters, you might as well devote yourself henceforth to gardening or collecting stamps. But if you promise to pad their wallet instead, you may start practicing your statesman’s table manners.
We are not talking of buying votes, don’t get us wrong. That practice, merrily pursued in many a place around the world, would be anathema in Sweden, where our researchers based their analysis. We are talking here about what campaigning parties promise as part of their electoral platform.
The study, the first to estimate the causal effect of election promises on voting, examines two reforms that appeared as campaign promises in Swedish parliamentary elections and were subsequently implemented; both had substantial economic consequences for a specific group of voters.
This gave our researchers a chance to test for what they label pocketbook voting, i.e. voting along monetary interests. The above reforms, in turn, were ideal for studying both prospective voting, which is based on how electoral promises may affect the voter’s disposable income if implemented, as well as retrospective voting, i.e. how implemented policies have affected disposable income.
In the 1994 election campaign, the Social Democrats suggested major cuts in financial support for parents with young children, as a way to fight the budget deficit. In 1998, the same party promised to cap child-care fees in order to reduce such outlays for families with young children. The party won both elections and implemented the policies.
Parents with older children were practically unaffected by the reforms, so comparing their voting patterns with those of parents with younger children neatly served to identify the voting responses to the reforms.
The findings? People do consult with their wallet before casting a ballot. In the 1994 election, parents with young children clearly voted against reforms that would impact their disposable income; conversely, they backed the same party in 1998 when it promised to give them a financial leg-up. Prospective voting had indeed won the day in both cases.
The same holds for referendums, as the same author, now with his colleagues Johannes Meya and Robert Schwager, shows in a different paper, in which they empirically analyse the motives for participating in a referendum and for voting against or in favour of a proposal. In this case, the authors used a couple of referendums on deeply discounted flat-rate tickets that would give all students at a given university the right to unlimited use of public transportation or cultural amenities. The catch was that, if passed, buying the ticket would become compulsory for every student, even for those who had no intention of using such facilities. In this sense, introducing such a ticket resembles the collective provision of a public good: the service becomes much cheaper by providing it collectively, but all voters, including those who do not use the service, have to pay taxes to finance it.
The results once again showed that monetary interests are a major driver of both turnout and voting decisions.
Interestingly, however, social preferences like altruism, public good considerations and paternalism were found to shift the vote of a sizable minority against their own financial interests. So, pocketbook voting or no, there is still place for the interests of others.
The upshot? If during your electoral campaign you have to promise measures that will hurt the voters’ wallet, wrap the measures in such breast-filling notions as the good of the nation, altruism and selflessness. You might just pull it off.
Mikael Elinder, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara: "Promises, Policies and Pocketbook Voting", European Economic Review, April 2015, pages 177-194
Johannes Meya, Panu Poutvaara and Robert Schwager: "Pocketbook Voting and Social Preferences in Referenda", CESifo Working Paper No. 5267
Mikael Elinder, Henrik Jordahl and Panu Poutvaara: "Selfish and Prospective: Theory and Evidence of Pocketbook Voting", CESifo Working Paper No. 2489