Loss Aversion, Presidential Responsibility, and Midterm Congressional Elections

John W. Patty
Additional contact information
John W. Patty: Carnegie Mellon University

Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I explore a behavioral model of political participation, first introduced by Quattrone and Tversky [1988], based on the primitives of prospect theory, as defined by Kahneman and Tversky [1979]. The model offers an alternative explanation for why the President’s party tends to lose seats in midterm congressional elections. The model is examined empirically and compared against competing explanations for the “midterm phenomenon”.

Keywords: Loss aversion; midterm elections; congressional elections; negative voting; midterm effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 D7 H (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2005-02-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 40
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0502/0502007.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwppe:0502007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).