Theory And Empirical Analysis Of The "Economic Voting"

The Wall Street financial crisis arising from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in American became a totally economic earthquake in the year of2008.And along with the sharp drop of the global stock market, numerous financial institutions fell down in succession, meanwhile, the public’s complains about "bad" economy situation arouse the confidence-crisis of the incumbent party. In this context, the presidential candidate from the Democracy, Barack Obama, took a huge success in the competing with the Republic candidate, McCain, and it was the first victory for the Democracy since Clinton left. In this election, American voted the first BLACK president ever in the history, which is more noteworthy is that the phenomenon of the "Economic Voting".The factors that influence the voting outcome are varied from each other. From the view of Macro, voters’evaluations including the performance of the incumbent in the dimensions of foreign policies, economy policies, as well as the military actions can affect the outcomes of the election. While in the view of Micro, the inherent social and economic characteristics and party identification of the voters also matters. However, in the2008presidential election of American, the issues related to the economy were the core in the minds both of voters and candidates.What’s the effect of the economic factors in this election? Whether the impact of "Economic-Voting" really existed? Whether voters used the reward-punishment model to express the unsatisfied emotions of the personal or state’s economy condition? Or depended on which kind of approaches, can voters realized their max-utility? Obviously, we can’t use the traditional party identification or simple model of retrospective or prospective models to explore these questions.This paper was on the premise of "rational choice", based on the theory of "Economic-Voting", took the presidential election of American in the2008for example to clear the concept of the "Economic Voting" by using the comprehensive methods in both aggregate and individual level.