Replication Data for: Partisanship, Economic Assessments, and Presidential Accountability

Few issues are more salient for voters or more important in political decision-making than economic conditions, and no American public official is more closely associated with the economy than the president. Existing scholarship disagrees, however, about how partisan loyalties affect economic evaluations. We study how partisan control of the presidency affects economic perceptions using eight waves of panel data collected around the 2016 presidential election from a national probability sample. We find that while individual-level perceptions are largely stable across time, the change in partisan control of the White House was associated with more positive evaluations among Republicans and more negative evaluations among Democrats. These effects are statistically significant yet substantively modest in magnitude. Our results indicate that partisanship is less strongly associated with economic assessments than some previous scholarship has claimed and suggest more sanguine conclusions about the prospects for presidential accountability even in a partisan era.

于选民而言，经济状况是最受关注、在政治决策中权重最高的议题；而在美国公职群体中，总统与经济议题的绑定程度最为紧密。然而，现有学术研究在党派忠诚度如何影响经济评价这一问题上存在分歧。本研究借助2016年美国总统大选前后采集的全国概率抽样样本的八轮面板数据，探究总统职位的党派掌控如何作用于民众的经济感知。研究结果显示，尽管个体层面的经济感知在多数时段大体保持稳定，但白宫党派掌控格局的更迭，与共和党群体的经济评价趋于积极、民主党群体的经济评价趋于消极显著相关。这些效应虽具备统计显著性，但实际影响幅度较为有限。本研究结果表明，党派倾向与经济评价之间的关联强度弱于此前部分学术研究的论断；即便在党派政治凸显的时代，研究结果也为总统履职问责的前景提供了更为乐观的结论。