General Economic Conditions and National Elections
质疑经济状况影响选民这一普遍看法，通过分析发现失业率和实际收入波动对全国选举结果并无显著影响，并基于理性选民行为提出解释。
The fact that economic conditions influence voters is a leading commonplace of conversation in election years. The question is: Is this fact in fact a fact? Despite the overwhelming popularity of the fact, it has received neither an explicit theoretical analysis, presumably because it is so obvious that economic adversity should create political adversaries, nor until recently a satisfactory statistical analysis.' Gerald H. Kramer has presented a multivariate analysis of congressional elections which would strongly suggest that fluctuations in the rate of unemployment have no appreciable effect upon elections, but that fluctuations in per capita real income are influential. In the following pages I propose to (1) reaffirm his finding on the electoral unimportance of ordinary fluctuations in unemployment, (2) argue that, contrary to Kramer, fluctuations in real income also do not have important electoral effects, and (3) present an argument based upon rational voter behavior for the unimportance of general economic conditions in national elections.