Abstract

The most heavily studied question in Political Science is why people vote the way they do. One of the primary explanations focuses on perceptions of the economy. We perform a simple micro-level model of the vote which confirms the present day conventional wisdom of societal level evaluations outweighing personal status. We then approach the endogeneity problem, discussing what it is, and why it is a problem in our analysis. We then discuss potential solutions to the problem and apply the most appropriate technique for our problem. We find that the evidence for individual level economic effects is not nearly as strong in the more developed statistical techniques. In conclusion we discuss the implications of the endogeneity problem for research methods in the social sciences in general.