The President, Referendum Voting, and Subnational Elections in the United States

This research is designed to generalize a referendum voting model and investigate its ability to account for the aggregate outcomes of elections for the House, Senate, governorships, and upper and lower chambers of state legislatures. Our analysis shows that these outcomes are influenced by the same systematic short- and long-term forces. In addition to this common referendum structure, the analysis reveals that there is a common response to random shocks, a subtle form of interdependence found in systems of seemingly unrelated regressions.