The Annex: 2.3% flat or 1.3% rising, and why voters may be looking for a slope rather than a total

The document. “Are Voters Myopic or Looking for Improvement?”, by Markus Prior of Princeton University and Talbot M. Andrews of Cornell University, in the American Political Science Review¹. Political science has long called voters short-sighted: when judging an incumbent, they weigh the economy of the final year and forget the rest of the term¹. Two days after a midterm, the paper asks whether that is a blind spot or a preference.

The line. In a choice experiment with more than 2,000 respondents, people saw two four-year paths: a flat rate of growth and a steadily rising one¹. On average, a flat income growth rate had to reach at least 2.3% before people gave up an improving trend that averaged only 1.3%¹. For temporary job creation, people preferred an improving market averaging 243,750 jobs a year unless the steady market guaranteed at least 350,000¹. Between 32% and 46% of the large sample, depending on the domain and time direction, chose rising paths that were worse in every single year¹.

The lines around it. In earlier surveys using four-year bar charts, people looking backwards weighted the most recent year most, which repeats the old “myopia” finding¹. But people judging projections of the future weighted the most distant year most¹. Across past and future, the highest ratings went to data that steadily improved¹. On this reading, voters are not so much short-sighted as slope-sighted.

The caveats. Part of the effect is the picture. When the researchers showed the cumulative total on screen and greyed out the empty space at the edges, so nobody could mentally extend the line, the preference for improvement shrank¹. It did not disappear¹. The charts were clean and smooth; real economies are jagged, and voters may react differently to bumps¹. Whether people actually reward incumbents this way when they vote is untested¹.

The constructive reading. The fix the researchers tried is ordinary statistical housekeeping: show the total, not only the shape. That is a job for the people who publish the numbers, statistics offices, central banks and newspapers alike. For you, the habit costs nothing. When a campaign graph climbs, ask what the bars add up to. Steady, boring growth that compounds is easy to undervalue because it never looks like a comeback.