caa a22 4500 386342075 CHVBK 20190412221954.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198906 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/1962396 doi S0003055400083283 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/1962396 Partisan Cycles in Congressional Elections and the Macroeconomy [Elektronische Daten] In the postwar United States the president's party has always done worse in the midterm congressional elections than in the previous congressional election. Republican administrations exhibit below-average, and Democratic administrations above-average, economic growth in the first half of each term, whereas in the latter halves the two see equal growth. Our rational expectations model is consistent with these two regularities. In presidential elections, voters choose between two polarized candidates. They then use midterm elections to counterbalance the president's policies by strengthening the opposition in Congress. Since presidents of different parties are associated with different policies, our model predicts a (spurious) correlation between the state of the economy and elections. Our predictions contrast with those of retrospective voting models, in which voters reward the incumbent if the economy is doing well before the election. Our model performs empirically at least as well as, and often better than, alternative models. Copyright © American Political Science Association 1989 Alesina Alberto Harvard University Rosenthal Howard Carnegie-Mellon University American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 83/2(1989-06), 373-398 0003-0554 83:2<373 1989 83 PSR https://doi.org/10.2307/1962396 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/1962396 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Alesina Alberto Harvard University NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Rosenthal Howard Carnegie-Mellon University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- American Political Science Review Cambridge University Press 83/2(1989-06), 373-398 0003-0554 83:2<373 1989 83 PSR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence SWISSBIB 386342075 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge