Economic Voting and Political Sophistication in the U.S.:
A Reassessment
ABSTRACT
We propose a re-examination of the conditioning effect of political sophistication on economic
voting in U.S. presidential elections. Testing Gomez and Wilson’s (2001) hypotheses with
survey data from the last five American presidential elections (1988-2004), we show that low
sophisticates strictly but systematically rely on sociotropic economic judgments when deciding
to support the incumbent party’s candidate. For their part, high sophisticates appear to use
both sociotropic and pocketbook evaluations in their voting decision, but only in elections
where the sitting incumbent is running for re-election (1992, 1996 and 2004). These results
indicate that increasing sophistication allows individuals to see the connection between
macroeconomic conditions and their own personal economic well-being. They also suggest
that having a better ability at making causal attributions leads individuals not to hold the
incumbent party’s candidate accountable for national and personal economic conditions in
open-seat presidential races.
Convention