Stephen Ansolabehere, Marc Meredith, and Erik Snowberg write:

The literature on economic voting notes that voters’ subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not. Missing from this literature is a description of how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy, and how that information is used to form perceptions. In order to begin understanding this process, we [Ansolabehere, Meredith, and Snowberg] asked a series of questions on the 2006 ANES Pilot about respondents’ perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home state.

We find that questions about gas prices and unemployment show differences in the sources of information about these two economic variables. Information about unemployment rates come from media sources, and are systematically biased by partisan factors. Information about gas prices, in contrast, comes only from everyday experiences.

This is no surprise, perhaps, but, still, I think this sort of work is important. The connection between economic conditions and political outcomes is hugely important, and increasingly recognized as such. But a key piece is the connection between perceptions, political ideology, and economic reality.