/biz/ - Business & Finance

http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/DemRep_BlinderWatson_July2015.pdf

>An extensive and well-known body of scholarly research documents and explores the fact that macroeconomic performance is a strong predictor of U.S. presidential election outcomes. Scores of papers find that better performance boosts the vote of the incumbent’s party. In stark contrast, economists have paid scant attention to predictive power running in the opposite direction: from election outcomes to subsequent macroeconomic performance. The answer, while hardly a secret, is not nearly as widely known as it should be. The U.S. economy performs much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is.

>Section 1 documents this fact, which is not at all “stylized.” The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous; it holds almost regardless of how you define success.