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At face, Ireland's economy had staged a remarkable recovery by 2020 since the devastating impact of the Global Financial Crisis. The economy was the fastest growing in Europe, unemployment had reached record lows, and Ireland's debt was back to its lowest level since 2009. The traditional economic voting model assumes voters punish outgoing governments for poor economic performance by voting against them but rewards incumbents for a sound economy by voting for them. Nevertheless, Irish voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the Fine Gael government in 2020, registering an incumbent administration's sixth-worst performance since 1932, raising questions about the applicability of the economic vote. Using the 2020 Irish National Election Study, our contribution unpacks this apparent puzzle. We uncover that macroeconomic conditions were less rosy than at first sight, a pattern recognised by voters. We find the economic vote was alive and well, with voter economic perceptions, and their views on income redistribution (and taxes/spending) having a potent effect on the vote. Brexit, as an economic issue, however, was not influential in shaping the vote. The Fine Gael challenge, and the answer to the conundrum, was most voters perceived the economy was lackluster and the government was on the wrong side of economic policy preferences of most voters.

Election forecasting is a cottage industry among pollsters, the media, political scientists, and political anoraks. Here, we plow a fresh field in providing a systematic exploration of election forecasting in Ireland. We develop a structural forecast model for predicting incumbent government support in Irish general elections between 1977 and 2020 (the Iowa model). We contrast this structural model with forecasts from opinion polls, the dominant means of predicting Ireland’s elections to date. Our results show that with appropriate lead-in time, structural models perform similarly to opinion polls in predicting government support when the dependent variable is vote share. Most importantly, however, the Iowa model is superior to opinion polls in predicting government seat share, the ultimate decider of government fate in parliamentary systems, and especially significant in single transferable vote (STV) systems where vote and seat shares are not always in sync. Our results provide cumulative evidence of the potency of structural electoral forecast models globally, with the takeaway that the Iowa model estimating seat share outpaces other prediction approaches in anticipating government performance in Irish general elections.

VEconomic theories assume that individuals are rational actors, and that their behavior can be explained as the result of a cost–benefit calculus. A large number of studies have used economic theories to explain political participation, but expectations are sometimes not met, with inconclusive results. This chapter discusses the usefulness and limitations of economic theories for explaining political participation, with an application to the effects of economic conditions on electoral turnout and mass protest. To summarize the state of the literature on the connection between economic conditions and these conventional and unconventional political behaviors, this chapter relies on meta-analytical techniques, to the extent possible.

Given Trump’s provocative personal profile, coupled with boasts of his political prowess, one might expect that the electorate would not allocate praise or blame at the ballot box in the usual reward and punishment way. They might blame him more than other candidates or, indeed, they might blame him less. Utilizing election forecasting as a benchmark, in particular the structural model of political economy, we assess whether voters blamed him less for his faltering performance with respect to leading policy issues, particularly the economy and COVID-19. Our findings suggest that, contrary to claims from supporters, voters punished him at least as much as they punished past presidents, when confronted with similar issue contexts. The Trump image of a leader with superior powers has the character of fiction, rather than fact.

Election forecasts, based on public opinion polls or statistical structural models, regularly appear before national elections in established democracies around the world. However, in less established democratic systems, such as those in Latin America, scientific election forecasting by opinion polls is irregular and by statistical models is almost non-existent. Here we attempt to ameliorate this situation by exploring the leading case of Argentina, where democratic elections have prevailed for the last thirty-eight years. We demonstrate the strengths—and the weaknesses—of the two approaches, finally giving the nod to structural models based political and economic fundamentals. Investigating the presidential and legislative elections there, 1983 to 2019, our political economy model performs rather better than the more popular vote intention method from polling.

The leading approaches to scientific election forecasting in the United States consist of structural models, prediction markets and opinion polling. With respect to the last, by far the dominant mode relies on vote intention polling, e.g., “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” However, there exists an abiding opinion polling strategy that shows a good deal of promise—citizen forecasting. That is, rather than query on vote intention, query on vote expectation, e.g., “Who do you think will win the upcoming election?” This approach has been pursued most extensively in the United Kingdom (Murr 2016) and the United States (LewisBeck and Tien 1999). Recent performance evaluations have shown that in the United Kingdom vote expectations clearly offer more predictive accuracy than vote intentions (Murr et al. forthcoming) and that in the United States vote expectations appear to be superior to an array of rival forecasting tools (Graefe 2014). However, the timing of the data collection has forced most of the studies using citizen forecasts to forecast elections ex post, i.e., after they occurred. Indeed, to date, there are only two ex ante citizen forecasting papers to have appeared before a national election (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2011; Murr 2016). Both these efforts forecasted British General Elections, with Murr (2016) relatively most accurate among 12 academic forecasts (Fisher and Lewis-Beck 2016).\ud \ud With respect to the United States, the case at hand, none of the work has been ex ante and all studies have focused on the national level, with the exception of a lone study carried out at the state level (Murr, 2015). The latter point seems critical, since the final selection of the president takes place in the Electoral College. The citizen forecasting research here stands unique, being ex ante and focusing on the states. Utilizing survey questions on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), administered in July, we render forecasts for the November 2020 presidential contest. This experiment, which has been conducted before-the-fact and looks at the states, provides a strong test of the quality of citizen forecasting in this American election.

The Political Economy model represents one of the earliest political science forecasting models for presidential elections. It relies on a multiple regression equation with just a few predictor variables, drawing from leading theories of vote choice, measured several months before the election. Much has been said about the uniqueness of the 2020 election campaign, e.g., COVID-19, the extreme character of Trump’s rule, the dramatic economic collapse, widespread protests ignited by George Floyd’s killing, among other things. We do not deny these circumstances. However, we believe their effects are absorbed, then expressed, via the causal structure the model suggests. Here we apply the model to forecast the 2020 presidential election (popular and Electoral College votes), followed by forecasts for the House and Senate elections. We forecast a Democratic sweep.

In recent US presidential elections, there has been considerable focus on how well public opinion can forecast the outcome, and 2016 proved no exception. Pollsters and poll aggregators regularly offered numbers on the horse-race, usually pointing to a Clinton victory, which failed to occur. We argue that these polling assessments of support were misleading for at least two reasons. First, Trump voters were sorely underestimated, especially at the state level of polling. Second, and more broadly, we suggest that excessive reliance on non-probability sampling was at work. Here we present evidence to support our contention, ending with a plea for consideration of other methods of election forecasting that are not based on vote intention polls.

We consider two criteria for evaluating election forecasts: accuracy (precision) and lead (distance from the event), specifically the trade-off between the two in poll-based forecasts. We evaluate how much “lead” still allows prediction of the election outcome. How much further back can we go, supposing we tolerate a little more error? Our analysis offers estimates of the “optimal” lead time for election forecasts, based on a dataset of over 26,000 vote intention polls from 338 elections in 44 countries between 1942 and 2014. We find that optimization of a forecast is possible, and typically occurs two to three months before the election, but can be influenced by the arrangement of political institutions. To demonstrate how our optimization guidelines perform in practice, we consider recent elections in the UK, the US, and France.

Election forecasting models based on voting theories and estimated via regression analysis are routinely available for virtually all advanced industrial democracies. Denmark, however, offers an exception, for no such prediction equations have been published on the Danish case. This absence has sometimes been attributed to the puzzling nature of economic voting there, along with the complexity of its multi-party system, which renders formulation of the dependent variable problematic. We attempt to overcome these obstacles, offering a “synthetic” forecasting model for Danish national election outcomes, 1964–2015. The regression model, based on the variables of economic growth and vote intention, performs well, by various tests. Finally, we apply it, ex ante fashion, to the 2019 contest, where the prediction favored the Social Democratic led coalition, an outcome that came to pass.

Past research on the relationship between income inequality and turnout has produced mixed results, with some studies suggesting that income inequality leads to lower turnout while other studies find little or no significant effects. In this article, we investigate the extent to which these mixed results are due to the contingent nature of inequality on turnout, which depends upon the nature of the policy options that are presented to the electorate. We test these expectations on data from national elections in 30 established democracies from 1965 through 2017 covering 300 elections. Regression analysis using country-level fixed effects reveals consistent evidence in favor of our hypotheses: Inequality tends to have a negative impact on turnout, especially in depolarized party systems, but as party system polarization increases the negative impact of inequality is mitigated.

Election forecasting is a growing enterprise. Structural models relying on “fundamental” political and economic variables, principally to predict government performance, are popular in political science. Conventional wisdom though is these standard structural models fall short in predicting individual blocs’ performance and their applicability to multiparty systems is restricted. We challenge this by providing a structural forecast of bloc performance in Ireland, a case primarily overlooked in the election forecasting literature. Our model spurns the economic and performance variables conventionally associated with structural forecasting enterprises and instead concentrates on Ireland’s historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of testing whether these patterns alone offer solid predictions of election outcomes. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), our approach, comprising measures of incumbency, short-term party support, and political and economic shocks, offers reasonable predictions of the vote share performance of four blocs: Ireland's two major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Independents, and the Left bloc combined across 20 elections spanning 60 years.

“It's the economy stupid”—is the phrase that captures the ubiquity of economics in determining election outcomes. Nevertheless, while several studies support the premise of economic voting, a constant critique of valence economic models is that partisan bias contaminates voters' economic perceptions, thus invaliding any independent effect of economic opinions on the vote. Here, we test whether partisanship may itself be endogenous to the macroeconomy. Aggregating data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), supplemented with European Social Survey (ESS) data to bolster the time analysis, we focus on macropartisanship and find a drop-off of party identifiers for governing parties in tandem with the economic downturn, specifically from rising unemployment. More generally, macropartisanship responds to economic conditions, suggesting that the endogeneity concern between party attachment and valence economic conditions is not unidirectional. That is, while economic perceptions may be influenced by party identification, party identification can be influenced by economic conditions. publishedVersion

There are various scientific approaches to election forecasting: poll aggregation, structural models, electronic markets, and citizen forecasting. With respect to the German case, the first two approaches—polls and models—perhaps have been the most popular. However, relatively little work has been done deploying citizen forecasting (CF), the approach described in this article. In principle, CF differs considerably from other methods and appears, on its face, quite simple. Before an election, citizens are asked in a national survey who they think will win. As the percentage of expectations for party X increases, the likelihood of an X win is judged to be higher. The method has been applied regularly with success in other established democracies, such as the United Kingdom and the United States.\ud \ud

Although the theory of retrospective voting receives wide support in the literature on voting behavior, less agreement exists on voters’ time horizon when assessing the government’s performance – i.e., whether voters are myopic. Previous studies on voter myopia tend to focus on aggregate-level measures of the economy, or use an experimental approach. Using panel data, this paper offers the first investigation into voter myopia that uses individual-level evaluations of government performance in a representative survey at several points during the electoral cycle. Our study focuses on The Netherlands, but we also provide tests of the generalizability and robustness of our findings, and a replication in the U.S. context. The results indicate that voter satisfaction early in the government’s term adds to explaining incumbent voting. Thus, rather than the myopic voter, we find evidence of the abiding voter – steady at her or his post, evaluating government performance over a long length of time. ispartof: European Journal Of Political Research vol:59 issue:3 pages:1-23 status: Published online

The surprising election of Donald Trump to the presidency calls for a comprehensive assessment of what motivated voters to opt for a controversial political novice rather than a provocative but experienced political veteran. Our study provides a novel exploration of the Trump victory through the prism of the defeated candidate—Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC). Losing candidates’ perceptions are usually not subject to academic analyses. Nevertheless, these people often hold substantial sway in their parties and thus understanding their views on the loss is essential, especially as a party regroups after defeat. Using HRC’s memoir What Happened, we devise the Hillary Hypotheses, her rationale for her electoral defeat. Using the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), we provide the first systematic test of a losing candidate’s rationale for their defeat. We show that more often than not, HRC’s assumptions are supported. However, we find little evidence to support HRC’s most crucial assertion, namely that the e-mail scandal and specifically James Comey’s intervention ten days before Election Day cost her the presidency. Our findings have implications for understanding why Donald Trump won, but more broadly the contribution explores an understudied aspect of elections—a defeated candidate’s impression of their loss.

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? We address this question by comparing eight forecasting models for British general elections: one based on voters’ expectations of who will win and seven based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including “uniform national swing model” and “cube rule” models). The data come from ComRes and Gallup polls as well as the Essex Continuous Monitoring Surveys, 1950 – 2017, yielding 449 months with both expectation and intention polls. The large sample size allows us to compare the models’ prediction accuracy not just in the months prior to the election, but over the years leading up to it. In predicting both the winning party and parties’ seat shares, we find that vote expectations outperform vote intent ions models. Vote expectations thus appear an excellent tool for predicting the winning party and its seat share.

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.

Among certain politicians, pundits and people, the expectation was that President Trump would make an economic difference in the 2018 congressional elections. In particular, the belief was that his economic appeal, coupled with his economic policies, would favor Republican candidates. However, an application of the classic referendum model for forecasting congressional outcomes shows no detectable Trump economic effect. That is, the economic conditions prevailing prior to the election, measured in multiple ways, worked as usual, helping to predict the actual Republican 40 seat loss rather closely. Put another way, any incumbent administration, faced with this set of numbers, would likely have experienced the same outcome. In sum, the Trump presence, in its economic manifestations, did not positively impact the Republican party fortune at midterm time.

The process of European integration, through institutions such as the European Union, the Eurozone, or Schengen, implies a shift in political decision-making away from the national governments and towards international institutions. This gradual shift in the balance of power, furthermore, is increasingly debated by citizens. As a result, European integration might lead to an erosion of satisfaction with democracy in European countries. By means of a longitudinal analysis of the determinants of satisfaction with democracy in European countries, we test this expectation. We find no indication that the shift in the balance of power, and the trend towards more European integration indeed have eroded satisfaction with the functioning of (national) democracy.

The symposium aims to analyse the politicisation of the European issue following the onset of the Eurozone crisis, in particular its impact on individual attitudes and voting both at the national and supranational level. By way of an introduction, we address the state of the art on the importance of the Eurozone crisis for EU politicisation, as well as outlining each article and its contribution. While our authors may sometimes focus on different dependent variables, they all speak to the question of whether the Great Recession made a lasting difference, and whether EU politicisation matters. Most articles are longitudinal, and test for changes due to the crisis (Dassonneville, Lewis- Beck and Jabbour; Ruiz-Rufino; Talving and Vasilopoulou; Jurado and Navarrete). But preoccupation with the Great Recession is also present in the articles assessing the political learning that unfolded from it (Ruiz-Rufino), or the ones which investigate whether EU effects can be detected during the post-crisis years (Talving and Vasilopoulou; Lobo and Pannico; Heyne and Lobo). Despite the diversity of approaches, and certain differences in findings, each article contributes to a major debate ongoing in the literature, especially three key debates which have arisen: the crisis’ impact on European party systems, economic voting, and the degree of legitimacy of democratic systems.

Progressive tax rates are one of the main instruments for redistribution within advanced liberal democracies. In this study, we investigate public support for this policy. In our analysis of a novel question included in the Belgian Electoral Study (2019) we show that left-wing citizens are strongly in favour of this system. Importantly, high levels of political sophistication strengthen the association between ideology and preferences for progressive taxation, while political sophistication weakens the association between income and rejecting progressive tax policies. Support for a flat tax policy follows exactly the opposite pattern. Hence, for a highly sophisticated group apparently there is no conflict between a tax system that might hurt their short-term material interests, and support for a more equal society. ispartof: Journal Of European Public Policy vol:29 issue:4 pages:550-567 status: published

This paper replicates the analysis conducted in Burkhart and Lewis-Beck (1994), using current statistical software, where economic development demonstrates a causal relationship to democracy in an extensive cross-national dataset from 1972-1989, even in the face of strong control variables such as regime history and world-system position. It extends those findings with a dataset of approximately 120 countries from 1972-2014, largely confirming the previously published findings.

Considerable research shows the presence of an economic vote, with governments rewarded or punished by voters, depending on the state of the economy. But how stable is this economic vote? A current argument holds its effect has increased over time, because of weakening long-term social and political forces. Under these conditions, short-term forces, foremostly the economic issue, can come to the fore. A counter-argument, however, sees the economic vote effect in decline, due to globalization. Against these rival hypotheses rests the status-quo argument: the economic vote effect remains unchanged. To test these claims, we estimate carefully specified models of the incumbent vote, at both the individual and aggregate levels. Western European elections provide the data, with particular attention to Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Perhaps surprisingly, we find the economic vote to be stable over time, a ‘standing decision’ rule that voters follow in national elections.

In recent electoral contests, political observers and media outlets increasingly report on the level of “authenticity” of political candidates. However, even though this term has become commonplace in political commentary, it has received little attention in empirical electoral research. In this study, we identify the characteristics that we argue make a politician “authentic”. After theoretically discussing the different dimensions of this trait, we propose a survey battery aimed at measuring perceptions of the authenticity of political candidates. Testing our measure using data sets from different countries, we show that the answers to our items load on one latent concept that we call “authenticity”. Furthermore, perceptions of candidate authenticity seem to correlate strongly with evaluations of political parties and leaders, and with vote intention, while they are empirically distinguishable from other traits. We conclude that candidate authenticity is an important trait that should be taken into account by future research.

We know that candidates and campaigns matter in democratic elections, but that knowledge may not be readily observed in most structural models of national election forecasting. For one, these models virtually never include direct, explicit candidate-related campaign variables as predictors. At most, these candidate/campaign variables are picked up indirectly, usually in polling measures, such as vote intention. For another, the models often manage accurate, ex ante forecasts of US presidential election results, even without the obvious pr​esence of such variables. In this effort, we aim to overcome this paradox by including more direct candidate and campaign measures in a long-standing structural equation model of presidential election forecasting, namely the Political Economy model. We find that inclusions of these candidate and campaign variables do improve the theoretical specification and the statistical performance of the model, and do yield generally more accurate forecasts. However, at least for the test case of the 2016 contest, that increased precision failed to substantively alter the Clinton popular vote forecast.

Candidate ‘authenticity’ has become a frequent explanation of electoral performance. Yet its study in electoral research has been largely neglected. Building on recent work, we test its relationship with candidate support in the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus through a survey of likely Caucus goers. The Caucus offers an ideal setting — a contest focused on candidates and their personalities, in a context having far-reaching political implications. We demonstrate that authenticity perceptions played an important role in individual vote intentions. Indeed, for Biden and Buttigieg perceptions of their authenticity were strongly associated with vote intention even when controlling for other established traits. Warren, unlike the others, benefited indirectly, because her authenticity triggered substantial support among female voters. The performance of the authenticity trait, direct and indirect, points to its pivotal potential in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Institutions are thought to matter for vote choice, and work on economic voting is exemplary in this regard. The strength of the economic vote varies considerably cross-nationally and this seems to emanate from differences in the clarity of responsibility. Still, this conceptual frame, dominant in the field, appears to have some cracks. First, almost all work presents analyses of the economic vote in smaller, split samples of low- and high-clarity contexts separately. Second, the literature appears rather dispersed when the conceptual and empirical indicators are examined. The article attempts to overcome these limitations by analysing a large pool of democratic elections with a series of objective indicators. It investigates these indicators separately, and as components within two cumulative indices (institutional rules and power patterns). The results indicate that, even though there are indications of differences in the strength of the economic vote in high- and low-clarity contexts respective...

In democracies, we elect our political leaders by choosing among a rival set of candidates or parties. What makes us pick one over all the others? Do we carefully weigh the platforms of all the candidates and then select the one closest to our personal desires? Or, do we select the candidate our friends and neighbors recommend? Perhaps, even, to save time, do we just vote for the same party we did last time? All of these are choice strategies, and there are many more. Here we focus on a well-known explanation of how voters decide, commonly called the Michigan Model, so named for the university where it was developed, in a path-breaking scholarly volume—The American Voter. The authors systematically gathered data, via scientific survey research, on individual voters in American presidential elections, measuring different traits, perceptions, and attitudes that they hypothesized might influence vote choice. They arranged these different factors, or variables, into long-term forces and short-term forces that acted on the voter, and could be arrayed as if they were spread along a funnel of causality: from more remote, fixed variables, such as social class or party identification, to more proximate, fluid variables, such as issue preferences and candidate attributes. All these variables generally mattered, but those that concern us here deal with issues, in particular economic issues. How do voter evaluations of the economy help the voter decide what party to favor? Is it the national economy or the pocketbook that counts? How important are economic issues compared to other issues? What conditions make economic considerations more (or less) impactful? Does economic voting operate differently in different countries? These and other questions are addressed herein, with special attention to three leading democracies where economic voting has been heavily studied—the United States, Britain, and Germany. As demonstrated, economic considerations are pervasive and powerful elements in the democratic voter’s calculus.

Voter turnout still receives considerable attention in electoral studies. Recently, there have been numerous investigations of a neglected determinant, sometimes labeled “patrimony” and here labeled “wealth.” This variable, measuring how much wealth a voter has, appears to help account for party choice, beyond more usual socioeconomic measures. However, as yet we know little about how wealth affects voter turnout. In this article, we explore the relationship of wealth to voter turnout, using a battery of questions on wealth, administered in 28 nations, from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). We observe that more wealth corresponds to higher voting turnout. Further, the strength of this link compares favorably to that of more traditional measures, such as income and education. Theoretically, such a sharp empirical result suggests expanding the resource model of electoral participation in order to include this less traditional, but more encompassing, measure of economic status.

We examine the economics and elections connection, often referred to as economic voting, via a review of key studies by economists and political scientists, focusing on key generalizations applicable across democracies. Early work (1930s–1960s) was exploratory, seeking to establish whether economics mattered for elections, in the examination of individual country studies. In two strands of later work, one (1970–1990) developed “vote-popularity functions” over time; another (1980–2000) researched micro-level economic voting in national election surveys. Leading, global generalizations began to emerge in the contemporary period (2000s–2010s), such as the following: sociotropic retrospective economic evaluations dominate the economic vote choice, the economic vote itself can vary with clarity of policy responsibility, and the strong research results at the national level mirror results at the individual voter level. Currently, questions of the impact of economic crisis, and further dimensions of the economic vote, such as positional or patrimonial voting, are under serious consideration.