Political sophistication and economic voting in the American electorate: A theory of heterogeneous attribution

This article presents a theory of heterogeneous attribution, in which an individual's ability to make causal associations depends on his level of political sophistication. Specifically, we maintain that political sophistication dramatically influences the relative importance of personal and national economic judgments in shaping presidential candidate preference, Pocketbook voting, we argue, should be common only among relatively sophisticated voters, who are able to make the associative linkage between changes in their personal financial status and governmental policy. Additionally, we hypothesize that sociotropic evaluations should be most influential for less sophisticated voters. Low sophisticates, we argue, will tend to assume that the national economy is entirely in the President's hands (and vote accordingly), whereas more sophisticated voters understand that the economy is affected by many actors and conditions that are largely beyond the President's control. Testing our theory using data from 1992, 1996, and 1998, we find strong support for our hypotheses.