 Presidential Popularity and Negative Voting: An Alternative Explanation of the Midterm Congressional Decline of the President's Party*Samuel Kernell American Political Science Review, 1977, vol. 71, issue 1, 44-66 Abstract: Midterm congressional elections have been generally viewed as relatively sterile affairs marked by reduced turnout, party voting, and the play of politically idiosyncratic forces such as friends-and-neighbors voting. The usual reduction in the number of seats controlled by the President's party, according to the “surge and decline” thesis, simply reflects the departure of short-term forces which presumably benefited the president's party two years earlier. In this study an alternative thesis is proposed which considers midterm election outcomes within the context of the current political environment. Evaluations of the President's performance are found to be directly associated with congressional preferences over a series of midterm elections from 1946 through 1966. Moreover, controlling for party identification, persons who disapprove of the President's performance were generally more likely to vote and to cast their ballot against the President's party than were his admirers to support it. This “negative voting” bias helps to explain why the Democratic and Republican parties have performed more poorly in those midterm elections during which they occupy the White House. Date: 1977 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:71:y:1977:i:01:p:44-66_25 Access Statistics for this article More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK. |
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