caa a22 4500 467916713 CHVBK 20180406152905.0 cr unu---uuuuu 170328e20060601xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s11205-005-4506-y doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s11205-005-4506-y Hagerty Michael Graduate School of Management, University of California, 95616, Davis, CA, USA aut Quality of Life from the Voting Booth: The Effect of Crime Rates and Income on Recent U.S. Presidential Elections [Elektronische Daten] [Michael Hagerty] Quality of Life (QOL) is often measured with surveys of citizen's satisfaction. In contrast, the current research uses already-existing voting data to infer citizens' perceptions of QOL. Under this model, citizens decide how much their QOL has improved (or declined) since the last election, and then vote to reward (or punish) the incumbent party accordingly. Analysis of the popular vote for the incumbent party then allows inference on how citizens judge their QOL and how they weight the various domains. Previous research has concluded that voters reward an incumbent who improves the economic domain prior to election. I test whether voters also reward declining crime rates, and estimate how citizens weight the relative importance of each in determining QOL. I analyze the vote shares by state from U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 1996. Results show that changes in crime rates do influence vote share, consistent with the responsibility hypothesis, but to a smaller degree than the economic domain does. The method described provides convergent evidence that citizens weight domains differentially, and can provide the weights for a national QOL index. Springer, 2006 election forecasting nationallicence quality of life nationallicence responsibility hypothesis nationallicence violent crime rate nationallicence Social Indicators Research Kluwer Academic Publishers 77/2(2006-06-01), 197-210 0303-8300 77:2<197 2006 77 11205 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-005-4506-y text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-005-4506-y text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Hagerty Michael Graduate School of Management, University of California, 95616, Davis, CA, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Social Indicators Research Kluwer Academic Publishers 77/2(2006-06-01), 197-210 0303-8300 77:2<197 2006 77 11205 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer