Public Mood and Presidential Election Outcomes in Mexico

Who wins elections and why?1 This question seems straightforward, and political scientists should certainly know enough to provide plausible answers. In scholarship on the United States, there is a cottage industry in explaining and forecasting aggregate election outcomes, and plausible answers abound (Campbell 2012). Most such models and theories have settled on one overriding cause: the health of the macroeconomy (Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992). The incumbent party does well on election day when the economy is booming, while the opposition party is likely to perform well when the economy is sluggish. This standard retrospective economic voting model has taken firm root in scholarly understandings of Latin American election outcomes as well. There is now an impressive body of evidence demonstrating the importance of valence issues and reward-and-punishment orientations in Latin American voting behavior (Remmer 1991; Singer and Carlin 2013). Latin American voters, it seems, vote out incumbent parties that oversee poor economies, and they re-elect ones that govern during times of economic growth. This chapter does not take issue with the core of the retrospective voting claim: it is simple yet explanatorily powerful. Instead, I argue that it is incomplete for the Latin American