Who is Held Responsible? Further Evidence on the Hibbing-Alford Thesis

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Macroeconomic conditions clearly exert an impact on the electoral fortunes of the governing party, but little agreement exists about the microlevel mechanisms that underlie the aggregate relationships. In particular, efforts to base the aggregate findings on the financial fortunes of individual voters have proved fruitless. Hibbing and Alford suggest, however, that previous studies failed to differentiate among three types of in-party candidates--incumbents, open-seat candidates, and challengers of out-party incumbents--and that only in the first category should we find individual voters holding the in-party responsible. The strongest support for the argument is an analysis of 1978 survey data. This article replicates the Hibbing-Alford findings for 1978 using a different methodology and provides additional analyses from five more election studies. In all, four of six elections yield a pattern of coefficients broadly consistent with the Hibbing-Alford thesis, but in only two elections--both presidential election years surprisingly enough--are the results on solid statistical ground.