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All Economics is Local: Spatial Aggregations of Economic Information*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2016

David Fortunato ,
Clint S. Swift  and
Laron K. Williams
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Abstract

National economic indicators play a foundational role in political economic research, particularly in regards to electoral politics. Yet, scholars have failed to recognize that national economic indicators are simply aggregations of local economic information, and the manner in which they are aggregated may not be consistent with the process voters use to acquire, access, and incorporate economic information. We argue that the economic similarities among localities, and the way in which the media report on these similarities, provide more theoretically satisfying means of specifying how local information aggregates into an overall portrait of the national economy. We introduce a novel estimation procedure called the spatial-X ordered logit that offers the chance to model how voters’ evaluations respond to changes in contextualized economic information. Our results support our theory that voters incorporate economic information from other localities with similarly structured economies and in ways that are shaped by media messages. Furthermore, these two specifications offer greater explanatory power than national indicators and other geographical means of aggregating economic information. We conclude by offering a number of implications for research questions ranging from electoral accountability to spatial diffusion processes.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 467 - 487
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

David Fortunato, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 2010 Allen Building, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4348 (fortunato@tamu.edu). Clint S. Swift, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri, 103 Professional Building, Columbia, MO 65211-6030 (csswift@mail.missouri.edu). Laron K. Williams, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri, 103 Professional Building, Columbia, MO 65211-6030 (williamslaro@missouri.edu). Previous versions of this project were presented at the “Conference on Methodological Innovations in Comparative Politics,” Texas A&M University, 2015 and the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. The authors would like to thank Tom Hansford, Eric Neumayer, Thomas Plümper, Vera Troeger, and Guy D. Whitten for their extremely helpful comments. D.F. is grateful to the Hellman Fellows Fund for their generous support. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2016.26

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