>Michael Hoover wrote:
>
>>paper that bartels wrote with achen about electoral implications of
>>natural disasters used to be available on line but link no longer
>>appears to work...
>
>It's this one, right?
><http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/PERG.Achen.pdf>
Gotta love this, from the conclusion (after the paper demonstrates that voters punish incumbent parties/presidents for droughts and shark attacks that they had nothing to do with):
>Our account of democratic politics strikes directly at key
>assumptions in two different contemporary schools of thought.
>Perhaps most obviously, it questions the ability of ordinary
>citizens to assess their public life critically, listen to the
>proposals for change coming from contenders for public office, and
>then choose between the candidates in accordance with their own
>values. Like most survey researchers who have talked extensively to
>real voters, we believe that few such citizens exist. The present
>paper is one more item of evidence. The central fact about
>democracies is that the voters understand little beyond their own
>and their community's pain and pleasure, and they think about causes
>and effects as the popular culture advises them to think. The
>romantic vision of thoughtful democratic participation in the common
>life is largely mythical. Democracy must be defended some other way,
>if it is to be defended at all.
>
>Our work also strikes a blow at the customary fallback position for
>contemporary defenders of democracy, namely the view that the voters
>may know very little, but they can recognize good and bad government
>performances when they see them. Hence they can choose
>retrospectively in a defensible way. In most recent scholarly
>accounts, retrospection is a natural and rational feature of
>democratic politics. In our view it is natural but not so obviously
>rational. Voters operating on the basis of a valid, detailed
>understanding of cause and effect in the realm of public policy
>could reward good performance while ridding themselves of leaders
>who are malevolent or incompetent. But real voters often have only a
>vague, more or less primitive understanding of the connections (if
>any) between incumbent politicians' actions and their own pain or
>pleasure. As a result, rational retrospective voting is harder than
>it seems, and blind retrospection sometimes produces consistently
>misguided patterns of electoral rewards and punishments.