Smart economic voting? On the impact of political sophistication on economic voting mechanisms

Empirical studies related to economic voting usually confirm the presence of the sociotropic economic voting model and at the same time indicate no significant relationships associated with egotropic (or pocketbook) economic voting model (Stokes 2001; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2007; Linn, Nagler, and Morales 2010). However, the usual practice in studies related to economic voting is to treat voters as a homogenous group, tacitly assuming that each voter should react in the same way on the economic situation of the country or his/her household. Two theoretical insights indicate that using sociotropic or egotropic mechanism by voters could be related to political sophistication, and they predict the different direction of relationships. According to Weatherford (1983) and Conover, Feldman and Knight (1986), political sophistication should increase the effect of the sociotropic economic voting model. Costs of getting the information about the state of the country economy are important in this perspective. Those costs are lower for more sophisticated voters, and that is why they should tend to vote according to sociotropic model. On the other hand, according to Gomez and Wilson (2006), political sophistication should increase the effect of the egotropic voting model. Their predictions are based on cognitive foundations of economic voting and processes of attribution of responsibility. From this perspective, a higher level of voter's political sophistication is needed to connect personal economic situation to actions of a government. In this paper, empirical verification of those two conceptions will be conducted in the case of the last Polish Parliamentary elections held in 2015. Analyses will be based on a unique dataset of the Polish National Election Study, in which battery of questions related to political sophistication was included.