Three Essays on Economic Voting: Improving on Measures and Understanding of Economic Perceptions

This dissertation contributes to the literature on the relationship between economic conditions and vote choice from a methodological standpoint. It investigates the shortcomings in the survey measures commonly used to study economic voting, proposes a new survey instrument that better captures the information required by the theory, and explores the effects of economic shocks on economic perceptions.;The first paper investigates what is contained in answers to the standard prospective sociotropic economic assessment question. It shows that --- before the election --- respondents provide an assessment about the economy under the incumbent party if they prefer that party (regardless of whether they think it will win the election), or a challenger when they prefer that party and think it is also the likely winner of the election. After the election, respondents converge on the state of the economy under the winner of the election. The model is tested on 1997 pre and post-election British Election Studies (BES) data.;The second paper proposes a methodologically refined and theoretically grounded survey instrument to measure prospective economic assessments based on questions that are explicitly conditional on a party being in office, and a response scale that disambiguates direction of assessments. It shows that the proposed questions better capture the theoretical requirements to investigate economic voting in multiparty settings, and that the proposed response scale helps improve classification of vote choice in econometric models. The validity of these newly proposed questions and their response scales is tested on survey experiments conducted in the US and Mexico in 2008 and 2012.;The third paper explores the effects of the economic crisis of 2008-2009 on the linkage between economic perceptions and objective economic conditions in the US and Mexico between 2007 and 2012. It finds that retrospective and prospective economic perceptions in the US throughout the whole period responded symmetrically to economic activity indices, while the relationship was asymmetrical and applicable only to retrospective and negative prospective assessments in Mexico. It fails to find a relationship between economic variables --- such as inflation, unemployment or GDP growth --- and economic perceptions in both countries during this period.