Bringing the President Back In

• Author: Thomas M. Holbrook,Aaron C. Weinschenk,Clayton Clouse
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912911398051
• Published date: 01 June 2012
• Date: 01 June 2012
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Research Quarterly

65(2) 263 –274

© 2012 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912911398051

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Since the publication of Fiorina’s (1981) seminal work,

studies of retrospective voting, especially economic retro-

spective voting, have assumed a prominent role in electoral

studies in the United States and around the globe. The cen-

tral tenet of retrospective voting is that voters make simple

assessments about current conditions, broadly defined,

and then support or oppose the incumbent administration

based on those assessments. While voters may judge the

incumbent administration on any number of criteria—

foreign policy, the economy, corruption, and so on—mu ch

of the focus in studies of retrospective voting has been on

the impact of the economic evaluations (Lewis-Beck and

Stegmaier 2000, 2007). For instance, election-forecasting

models are almost always retrospective in nature and almost

always include measures of economic performance as a key

retrospective indicator, often in conjunction with a measure

of presidential approval (Holbrook 2010).1

At first blush, the 2008 presidential election would seem

to offer the perfect context for strong retrospective voting:

a declining economy and an unpopular president should

both have sent strong signals to the electorate. In short, the

economic and political context in 2008 was so negative, in

comparison to other years, that forming and using retro-

spective evaluations should have been a relatively easy

task, one that would be expected to result in an Obama

victory. However, as we discuss below, there are good

reasons to have had more tempered expectations for

retrospective voting, and economic voting in particular.

More important, however, is that the campaign did not

unfold amid a single contextual backdrop; instead, the

context of the election changed dramatically with the focus

on economic turmoil that began in earnest when Lehman

Brothers Inc., a major financial services firm, collapsed on

September 15, 2008.2 We take advantage of this important

shift to test ideas about the impact of context on retro-

spective voting in the 2008 presidential election. Specif icall y,

we examine the evolution of retrospective voting during

the fall campaign, paying special attention to the much-

discussed collapse of the Lehman Brothers financial ser-

vices corporation as a potential catalyst for retrospective

voting. Specifically, we examine whether the collapse of

Lehman Brothers served a priming function, leading voters

to rely more heavily on economic perceptions following

the collapse. We also consider whether the collapse may

have helped turn voters’ attention to national conditions

more generally and led them to assign more weight not

398051PRQ65210.1177/106591291139805

1Holbrook et al.Political Research Quarterly

1University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:

Thomas M. Holbrook, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee,

Department of Political Science, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201

Email: holbroot@uwm.edu

Bringing the President Back In:

The Collapse of Lehman Brothers

and the Evolution of Retrospective

Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election

Thomas M. Holbrook1, Clayton Clouse1, and Aaron C. Weinschenk1

Abstract

Despite prevailing negative conditions, initial analyses of the 2008 presidential election, including this one, find significant

but not particularly strong economic voting effects during the fall campaign. In this article, the authors pay special

attention to how the economic information context changed during the campaign and how those changes affected

the evolution of retrospective voting. The findings show that there were two distinct phases of the fall campaign, that

retrospective voting was nonexistent prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers but was strong following the collapse.

In effect, the collapse of Lehman Brothers turned the election into a referendum election.

Keywords

economic voting, 2008 presidential election, retrospective voting, economic evaluations, presidential approval