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Do Irrelevant Events Affect Voters ’ Decisions ? Evidence from the Field

Does information irrelevant to government performance affect voting behavior? If so, what light does this shed on our understanding of the mechanisms underlying retrospective voting? While recent studies have suggested examples of voters appearing to reward and punish incumbents for events outside of their direct control, these analyses suffer from a principal limitation: politicians may still be reasonably expected to respond to and prepare for the events that they did not cause. To more precisely test for the effects of irrelevant information, we explore the electoral impact of local college football games just before an election, truly irrelevant events that government has nothing to do with and for which no government response would be expected. We find that a win in the ten days before Election Day causes the incumbent party to receive an additional 1.6 percentage points of the vote in Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections, with the effect being larger for teams with stronger fan support. In addition to conducting placebo tests based on post-election games, we also demonstrate causality by using the betting market‘s estimate of a team‘s probability of winning the game before it occurs to isolate the surprise component of game outcomes. We corroborate these aggregate-level results with a survey that we conducted during the 2009 NCAA Men‘s College Basketball Tournament, where we find that surprising wins and losses affect approval of President Obama and assessments of the health of the country. Our results suggest that, in addition to people processing available diagnostic information about the economy and other areas, another mechanism underlying retrospective voting involves voters‘ general sense of well-being acting as a conduit between macroeconomic conditions and