American Political Science Review
Are Voters Myopic or Looking for Improvement?
2026-09-01
Timing of valence outcomes plays an important role in key theories of electoral choice, and different models place different emphases on past and future outcomes. Whereas sanctioning models consider only retrospective evaluations as an accountability mechanism, selection models hold that voters use past and proposed future conditions to infer the incumbent’s ability to deliver benefits. Drawing on four surveys run on six different samples, we demonstrate that voters prefer improving conditions in both retrospection and prospection. In retrospection, this pattern is difficult to distinguish from overweighting of temporally proximate conditions, which gave rise to the notion of “the myopic voter.” Distinguishing the two processes, we find that people do not ignore early datapoints and reward improving conditions (in both retrospection and prospection). This preference for improvement does not simply reflect an uncritical heuristic for upward trends. People are not universally myopic and many genuinely value improving aggregate conditions retrospectively and prospectively.