express consistently liberal, conservative, or centrist positions on government policy” (1999, p.796).
Regarding information he reports that “the depth of ignorance demonstrated by modern mass
publics can be quite breathtaking” and “the number of Americans who garble the most elementary
points is... impressive” (p.785). Luskin’s summary is harsher: most voters “know jaw-droppingly
little about politics” (2002, p.282; see also Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).
As is well-known, these empirical regularities contrast sharply with premises about voters in
standard spatial models. In most Downsian formulations, citizens are assumed to have well-worked
out ideologies in their heads—so, e.g., in unidimensional models a host of issue-positions are reduced
in a consistent way to preferences over a single left-to-right spectrum—and to know a lot about
politics: e.g., they know where candidates stand in the (commonly constructed) ideological space
or at least to have unbiased estimates of these positions.
This gap between what we know empirically and what we assume theoretically was recognized
long ago by Stokes: “[Downs’] model includes some cognitive postulates that need to be drastically
qualified in view of what is known about the parties and electorates of actual political systems”
(1963, p.369). And though the empirical critique has had some influence on theorizing (e.g., the
work of Enelow and Hinich (1984) and Hinich and Munger (1994) clearly reflect concerns with
standard spatial premises about voters), the debate has been hampered, we believe, by the failure
of the critics to create their own models of electoral competition. Thus, the dialogue has mostly
been confined to exchanges between rational choice theorists and empirically oriented critics, which
has allowed the former to use the “you can’t beat something with nothing” reply (e.g., Shepsle
1996, p.217).
However, nearly forty years ago V.O.Key (1966) sketched out an alternative: the retrospective
theory of voting. Fiorina eloquently captured the heart of the idea.
“citizens...typically have one comparatively hard bit of data: they know what life has
been like during the incumbent’s administration.
They need not know the precise
ecnomic or foreign policies of the incumbent administration in order to see or feel the
results of those policies. And is it not reasonable to base voting decisions on results
as well as on intentions [i.e., campaign promises]? In order to ascertain whether the
incumbents have performed poorly or well, citizens need only calculate the changes in
2
Convention