Customer Reviews

Retrospective Voting in American National Elections

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An analysis of retrospective voting patterns would have surely been informative in the political science field back when this book was published in 1981. Here Fiorina uses data for elections up to 1976 to advance the theory that voters either can't or don't want to guess what will happen after an election, so they vote based on their perceptions of what candidates and parties have done prior to that point. This is called retrospective voting and it seems like common sense. Just note that this generally believable theory does not appear to hold true today, as voting has become more ideology-oriented and focused on the likeability of candidates, as opposed to the strong party identification that was common during the elections studied here. Also, this particular book starts with interesting treatments of the theories, but then becomes a rather mind-numbing statistical analysis of all related theoretical models, that sacrifices readability in favor of data constructed merely for the peer review process. [~doomsdayer520~]