Vote Choice and Economic Interests: A Test with Individual Income Data

Studies of economic voting that rely on subjective assessments of the economy suffer from the endogeneity of such assessments to the vote choice itself. I circumvent this problem using data from an economic panel survey that includes social and political variables, the British Household Panel Survey. I use the actual income voters report to have earned under the governments of the two main British parties to measure their economic benefits from these two parties. Using this measure I find that voters do tend to vote for the party that leaves them better off. This relationship is stronger among voters with a high level of information. of information. I also find that the relationship remains the same whether voters have past data of their party differential or need to guess it prospectively, supporting the prospective economic hypothesis. Finally, I find that even though sociodemographic characteristics explain to some extend the party differential the relationship remains robust to the introduction of these sociodemographic controls, indicating that the extend of actual economic voting goes beyond that usually detected with sociodemographic voting models.