Are Elections Too Much Like Musical Chairs? Economic conditions alter the outcomes of presidential elections, but economic conditions during certain time periods matter much more than others. Economic voters are short-sighted, it turns out, and their myopia makes American electoral accountability surprisingly haphazard. Sixty years of political history suggest that income growth in the months leading up to Election Day has a strong, consistent impact on the incumbent party's re-election prospects - what happens in the rest of a president's term is mostly irrelevant. If the last 15 presidential elections are a reliable guide, income growth between now and Nov. 6 will matter more to voters than how the economy has fared through President Obama's first 39 months in the White House. In 2004, Louis Uchitelle, an economics reporter for The Times, likened this pattern to a children's game of musical chairs: "If the economy is flourishing in the final weeks of a campaign, when the music stops, the incumbent is likely to be re-elected." Unfortunately, Uchitelle's metaphor seems apt. Income growth rates fluctuate substantially, and more or less randomly, from month to month. In other words, whether the economy happens to flourish or lag in the months just before an election is hardly more meaningful than whether Jacob or Jenny happens to be closer to the last empty chair. It is a bizarre way to pick the leader of the free world. The following chart summarizes the results of a statistical analysis relating presidential election outcomes since 1952 to changes in real disposable personal income per capita during each president's term. It shows how the incumbent party's popular vote margin has varied with income growth in each three-month quarter, from the quarter in which a president was inaugurated (Q1) to the quarter of the subsequent presidential election (Q16). The analysis also takes into account how long the incumbent party has held the White House, because incumbent vote margins tend to decline by 6 or 7 percentage points with each additional term. This analysis suggests that an additional percentage point of real income growth in the second quarter of a presidential election year increases the incumbent party's expected popular vote margin by more than 5 percentage points. In President Obama's case, this three-month period began April 1. Income growth in the rest of the election year also seems to matter, though the effect is somewhat smaller, about 3 or 4 percentage points for every additional percentage point of growth. Income growth earlier in the president's term seems to have little or no impact on the election outcome. In fact, income growth in the first year of a president's term probably reduces his expected vote margin, perhaps because voters make some allowance at election time for the good or bad economic conditions a president has inherited. If this "inheritance" effect manifests itself in 2012, it may provide a significant boost to Obama's re-election chances, since real income growth in 2009 was the worst by far in the past 60 years. Is there any reason to suppose that income growth in the months leading up to an election is an especially good measure of a president's overall economic performance or a reliable predictor of how things will go if he is re-elected? For example, real incomes grew by an unremarkable 0.5 percent per quarter through the first three years of Ronald Reagan's first term, but the income growth rate nearly tripled in 1984, averaging 1.4 percent per quarter. Reagan ran a feel-good campaign - "It's morning again in America" - and was re-elected in a landslide. About three-fourths of his 18-point popular vote margin was probably attributable to that extra election-year income growth. But if voters thought they were voting for sustained prosperity, they were mistaken. Income growth in Reagan's second term averaged an unremarkable 0.5 percent per quarter, just as it had been before the 1984 boom. It is hardly surprising that voters" moods and their assessments of the incumbent president are strongly colored by current economic conditions. From the standpoint of good government, however, their myopic focus on current conditions seems quite counter-productive. On one hand, myopic economic voting provides little electoral incentive for presidents to generate income growth through most of their terms, and a perverse incentive to artificially boost election-year growth with tax cuts and other gimmicks. On the other hand, myopic economic voting seems unlikely to contribute to post-election prosperity, since income growth between now and Election Day will shed little real light on whether the economy would fare better over the next four years under Obama or Mitt Romney. Some observers doubt whether presidents can do much to affect income growth anyway. Aren't global recessions, oil price shocks and the monetary policies of the Fed much more important economic factors? If presidential policies don't matter, then it is fruitless to reward or punish the incumbent for income growth at any point in his term. But if a president's policies do matter, as I believe they do, then voters would do better to weigh consistent differences in the parties" economic performance over long periods of time. Let's leave the musical chairs for birthday parties. Larry M. Bartels is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.