Quality of Life from the Voting Booth: The Effect of Crime Rates and Income on Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

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.