Voter Myopia in Individual Perceptions of Government Performance

The theory of performance voting receives wide support in the empirical literature on voting behaviour. Time and again voters are found to retrospectively evaluate the performance of the government and to vote according to this evaluation. There is less agreement, however, on the time horizon voters use when they assess the government’s performance – i.e., whether or not voters are myopic and only take into account the country’s state of affairs close to Election Day when they make up their mind. Furthermore, previous studies on voter myopia all focused on aggregate-level measures of the economy. Using panel data from the Netherlands, this study constitutes the first investigation into voter myopia taking into account voters’ individual-level evaluations of the government’s performance at different points during the electoral cycle. In doing so, we relax the assumption that voters evaluate the government based on economic conditions only. Furthermore, we explicitly address concerns about panel-correlated errors and endogeneity in perceptions of performance by using the instrumental variables-approach. The results show that voters’ satisfaction early in the government’s term adds to explaining voting for incumbent parties. Thus, although the myopia thesis prevails in most studies on retrospective voting, this does not seem to be supported by empirical results.status: publishe