Presidency Research; Voting Behavior

Political scientists forecast elections, not primarily to satisfy public interest, but to validate statistical models used for estimating many quantities of scholarly interest. Although scholars have learned a great deal from these models, they can be embarrassingly overconfident: Events that should occur once in 10,000 elections occur almost every year, and even those that should occur once in a trillion-trillion elections are sometimes observed. We develop a novel generative statistical model of US congressional elections 1954-2020 and validate it with extensive out-of-sample tests. The generatively accurate descriptive summaries provided by this model demonstrate that the 1950s was as partisan and differentiated as the current period, but with parties not based on ideological differences as they are today. The model also shows that even though the size of the incumbency advantage has varied tremendously over time, the risk of an in-party incumbent losing a midterm election contest has been high and essentially constant over at least the last two thirds of a century.

Please see "How American Politics Ensures Electoral Accountability in Congress," which supersedes this paper.
 

A vast literature demonstrates that voters around the world who benefit from their governments' discretionary spending cast more ballots for the incumbent party than those who do not benefit. But contrary to most theories of political accountability, some suggest that voters also reward incumbent parties for implementing "programmatic" spending legislation, over which incumbents have no discretion, and even when passed with support from all major parties. Why voters would attribute responsibility when none exists is unclear, as is why minority party legislators would approve of legislation that would cost them votes. We study the electoral effects of two large prominent programmatic policies that fit the ideal type especially well, with unusually large scale experiments that bring more evidence to bear on this question than has previously been possible. For the first policy, we design and implement ourselves one of the largest randomized social experiments ever. For the second policy, we reanalyze studies that used a large scale randomized experiment and a natural experiment to study the same question but came to opposite conclusions. Using corrected data and improved statistical methods, we show that the evidence from all analyses of both policies is consistent: programmatic policies have no effect on voter support for incumbents. We conclude by discussing how the many other studies in the literature may be interpreted in light of our results.

This is a book review of Steven J. Rosenstone, Forecasting Presidential Elections, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

In the election for President of the United States, the Electoral College is the body whose members vote to elect the President directly. Each state sends a number of delegates equal to its total number of representatives and senators in Congress; all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) assign electors pledged to the candidate that wins the state's plurality vote. We investigate the effect on presidential elections if states were to assign their electoral votes according to results in each congressional district,and conclude that the direct popular vote and the current electoral college are both substantially fairer compared to those alternatives where states would have divided their electoral votes by congressional district.

The enormous Nazi voting literature rarely builds on modern statistical or economic research. By adding these approaches, we find that the most widely accepted existing theories of this era cannot distinguish the Weimar elections from almost any others in any country. Via a retrospective voting account, we show that voters most hurt by the depression, and most likely to oppose the government, fall into separate groups with divergent interests. This explains why some turned to the Nazis and others turned away. The consequences of Hitler's election were extraordinary, but the voting behavior that led to it was not.

In their 1990 Review article, Ian Budge and Richard Hofferbert analyzed the relationship between party platform emphases, control of the White House, and national government spending priorities, reporting strong evidence of a "party mandate" connection between them. Gary King and Michael Laver successfully replicate the original analysis, critique the interpretation of the causal effects, and present a reanalysis showing that platforms have small or nonexistent effects on spending. In response, Budge, Hofferbert, and Michael McDonald agree that their language was somewhat inconsistent on both interactions and causality but defend their conceptualization of "mandates" as involving only an association, not necessarily a causal connection, between party commitments and government policy. Hence, while the causes of government policy are of interest, noncausal associations are sufficient as evidence of party mandates in American politics.

As most political scientists know, the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election can be predicted within a few percentage points (in the popular vote), based on information available months before the election. Thus, the general election campaign for president seems irrelevant to the outcome (except in very close elections), despite all the media coverage of campaign strategy. However, it is also well known that the pre-election opinion polls can vary wildly over the campaign, and this variation is generally attributed to events in the campaign. How can campaign events affect people’s opinions on whom they plan to vote for, and yet not affect the outcome of the election? For that matter, why do voters consistently increase their support for a candidate during his nominating convention, even though the conventions are almost entirely predictable events whose effects can be rationally forecast? In this exploratory study, we consider several intuitively appealing, but ultimately wrong, resolutions to this puzzle, and discuss our current understanding of what causes opinion polls to fluctuate and yet reach a predictable outcome. Our evidence is based on graphical presentation and analysis of over 67,000 individual-level responses from forty-nine commercial polls during the 1988 campaign and many other aggregate poll results from the 1952–1992 campaigns. We show that responses to pollsters during the campaign are not generally informed or even, in a sense we describe, "rational." In contrast, voters decide which candidate to eventually support based on their enlightened preferences, as formed by the information they have learned during the campaign, as well as basic political cues such as ideology and party identification. We cannot prove this conclusion, but we do show that it is consistent with the aggregate forecasts and individual-level opinion poll responses. Based on the enlightened preferences hypothesis, we conclude that the news media have an important effect on the outcome of Presidential elections–-not due to misleading advertisements, sound bites, or spin doctors, but rather by conveying candidates’ positions on important issues.

At one point during the 1988 campaign, Michael Dukakis was ahead in the public opinion polls by 17 percentage points, but he eventually lost the election by 8 percent. Walter Mondale was ahead in the polls by 4 percent during the 1984 campaign but lost the election in a landslide. During June and July of 1992, Clinton, Bush, and Perot each had turns in the public opinion poll lead. What explains all this poll variation? Why do so many citizens change their minds so quickly about presidential choices?

Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202 more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida. George W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after election day. In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more votes than Gore. These numbers are taken from the official results released by the Florida Secretary of State's office and so do not reflect overvotes, undervotes, unsuccessful litigation, butterfly ballot problems, recounts that might have been allowed but were not, or any other hypothetical divergence between voter preferences and counted votes. After the election, the New York Times conducted a six month long investigation and found that 680 of the overseas absentee ballots were illegally counted, and no partisan, pundit, or academic has publicly disagreed with their assessment. In this paper, we describe the statistical procedures we developed and implemented for the Times to ascertain whether disqualifying these 680 ballots would have changed the outcome of the election. The methods involve adding formal Bayesian model averaging procedures to King's (1997) ecological inference model. Formal Bayesian model averaging has not been used in political science but is especially useful when substantive conclusions depend heavily on apparently minor but indefensible model choices, when model generalization is not feasible, and when potential critics are more partisan than academic. We show how we derived the results for the Times so that other scholars can use these methods to make ecological inferences for other purposes. We also present a variety of new empirical results that delineate the precise conditions under which Al Gore would have been elected president, and offer new evidence of the striking effectiveness of the Republican effort to convince local election officials to count invalid ballots in Bush counties and not count them in Gore counties.