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

Macroeconomic conditions clearly exert an impact on the electoral fortunes of the governing party, but little agreement exists about the micro-level mechanisms which underlie the aggregate relationships. In particular, efforts to base the aggregate level findings on the financial fortunes of individual voters have proved fruitless. Hibbing and Alford suggest, however, that previous studies have 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 consists of an analysis of 1978 survey data. This note 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 on-year surprisingly enough—are the results on solid statistical ground.