ECONOMIC-CONDITIONS AND GUBERNATORIAL ELECTIONS - IS THE STATE EXECUTIVE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

This research examines economic retrospective voting in gubernatorial elections. Previous research has suggested that there is little (if any) accountability for state economic conditions in these electrons. In the research presented here, however, the author found evidence of economic retrospective voting in the 1990 gubernatorial elections, while controlling for potentially dominant national forces such as presidential popularity and the perceived health of the national economy. These findings (along with some of the more recent research in this area) suggest that perhaps the scholarly conventional wisdom about these elections needs to be reevaluated.