Affective Forecasting to Yield Prospective Voting

• In Event: Disasters and Electoral Politics

Abstract

Retrospective voting, which refers to voting on the basis of the past performance of elected officials,occurs not only in areas where the government is assumed to exert a degree of control, such as economic performance (Kramer 1971; Markus 1988; Lewis-Beck 1998), but also in policy areas that fall outside the scope of government control, most notably natural disaster policymaking(Abney and Hill 1966). Scholarship has focused on electoral impediments to prospective policies, like disaster preparedness and risk reduction (Achen and Bartels 2017; Cole, Healy, and Werker 2012). Broadly, this work suggests that elected officials have few political incentives to invest in collective disaster preparedness projects that benefit a community broadly because voters only care about issues that have an immediate and pressing impact on their individual day-to-day lives (Healy and Malhotra 2009, 2013).

The retrospective nature of voters thus makes it difficult for elected officials to expect to receive electoral benefits for policy that is prospective in nature. However, retrospective voting ignores the underlying psychological processes that shape how individuals conceptualize and respond to the future and therefore does not sufficiently explain how policies shape voters' support for politicians. We seek to address this void in the literature by examining the extent to which affective forecasting of prospective policies shapes voter preferences to support a politician. Affective forecasting refers to an individual's prediction about their future feelings, including the specific feelings that they will experience, how strong those feelings will be, and the duration of those feelings (Wilson and Gilbert 2003). Psychologists have developed various experiments for simulating affective forecasting in controlled settings, a number of which have been shown to positively influence individual disaster preparedness at a household level (Noda 2016).

However, it is unclear whether affective forecasting can be used to induce a similar level of support for collective political decisions like supporting pre-disaster activities. To this end, this study examines the relationship between affective forecasting and prospective voting in two different policy areas: disaster policy and economic policy. We predict that individuals will act prospectively when they have a negative affective forecast about the impact of a policy (Cohen-Blankshtain and Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2021). To test this hypothesis, we use an experimental survey design with two treatment groups and one control group for each policy area. Preliminary results indicate respondents who engage in affective forecasting for either a future disaster or economic crisis will report a greater affective response on average than the control conditions.


References
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Cohen-Blankshtain, Galit, and Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan. 2021. “Foregone and Predicted Futures: Challenges of Opportunity Cost Neglect and Impact Bias for Public Participation in Policymaking.” Journal of European Public Policy 28 (5): 677–97.

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———. 2013. “Retrospective Voting Reconsidered.” Annual Review of Political Science 16: 285–306.

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​​Markus, Gregory B. 1988. “The Impact of Personal and National Economic Conditions on the Presidential Vote: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Analysis.” American Journal of Political Science, 137–54.

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Hypothetical Earthquake/¿ Influye La Predicción Afectiva En La Motivación Para La Preparación Ante Las Catástrofes? La Motivación Un Mes Después de Un Terremoto Hipotético.” Revista de Psicología Social 31 (1): 109–36.

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Authors

• Sarah Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Rob A. DeLeo, Bentley University

• Kristin Taylor, Wayne State University