Forecasting the 2010 general election using aggregate local election data

The paper presents a revised method for estimating national vote shares using aggregate data from local government by-elections. The model was originally developed to forecast the annual outcome of local elections but was adapted in time to provide an accurate forecast of Labour’s landslide victory at the 1997 general election. However, over the past decade the changing pattern of party competition which has seen parties becoming more selective about which elections to contest has led to more elections being excluded from the modelling because they failed to meet the exacting criteria that all three major parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats, had contested both the by-election and the previous main election, normally held in May. Relaxing these criteria, although increasing the number of available cases would adversely affect the forecast, over- or under-estimating party votes. Instead, the revised method overcomes the problem of differential competition by estimating vote shares for parties that contest one but not both elections. A further innovation is the calculation of a weighted moving quarterly average which takes account of the number of days elapsed between the by-election date and the date of forecast. Using the new method we provide estimates for likely party shares for the 2010 general election.     

Forecasting the 2015 general election using aggregate local election data

Local government election results are used to estimate a national equivalent vote that provides the basis for a general election forecast. By-elections provide the means for calculating weighted quarterly averages of national support. These show trends similar to those obtained by national polls. By-election results in the three month period leading to the general election contribute towards the national vote share calculation and seat distributions are determined by uniform national swing. Additionally, results from the main council elections from 2011 onwards are aggregated to the parliamentary constituency level and used to estimate each party's relative performance in key target seats. This information is used to fine-tune the final seat forecast which suggests a hung parliament is the most likely outcome.     

Cross-national election surveys: A French pre-test

In common with scholars in other leading democracies, election researchers of France and the United States rely heavily on a survey research methodology; but their respective national election surveys do not pose many of the same questions, and the dominant research paradigms in each country offer opposing explanatory models of vote choice. Herein are reported preliminary results from a joint effort of US and French researchers, which seeks to include numerous cross-national items in the French National Election Study (for 1995). The following American National Election Study (ANES)-type items receive attention: candidate feeling thermometers, job approval ratings, economic evaluations, seven-point proximity measures on social issues and party identification. Inclusion of these measures in French surveys may allow an important cross-nation extension of voting models thought to be peculiar to one political culture, such as the US.     

Campaigning in an unprecedented election: issue competition in the French 2017 presidential election

Abstract

The 2017 French presidential elections featured an eventful campaign, produced astonishing results, and presented important signs of party system change. This paper analyses the main lines of divide of the demand and the supply side of electoral competition. It analyses the structure of citizens’ preferences, as well as the candidates’ strategic issue opportunities, relying on issue yield theory. To that end, it combines data from an original individual-level survey with information about the candidates’ Twitter messages. It is found that the traditional model of two-dimensional political space, characterised by an economic (left–right) and socio-cultural (integration–demarcation) dimension is largely challenged. On the supply-side, the analysis offers additional evidence for the central role played by the integration–demarcation divide, while showing that the traditional left–right conflict has not fully disappeared.     

Forecasting the 2015 British general election: The Seats-Votes model

This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from the ‘Law of Cubic Proportions’ the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which utilises the seats won by the major parties in the previous general election together with vote intentions six months prior to the general election to forecast seats. The model was reasonably successful in forecasting the 2005 and 2010 general elections, but has to be modified to take into account the ‘regime shift’ which occurred when the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.     

The winning of the 1995 French presidential election

The article analyses the processes which conditioned the outcome of the 1995 presidential election in France. By a fresh evaluation of four frequently made propositions, namely (1) the presidential contest is above party politics, (2) presidential candidacy is pre‐eminently about individual leadership, (3) the confrontation is between the incumbent (or his surrogates) and one or more ‘challengers’, and (4) this confrontation reinforces political polarisation, the unique configuration of the current French polity is delineated. In conclusion, the interaction between social and political fractures is shown to have been crucial to Chirac's victory.     

Forecasting the 2015 British election through party popularity functions

To forecast the May 7, 2015 British General Election, we develop party popularity models based on Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) data from April 2004 to February 2015. Our models predict party vote shares three months prior to the election, using previous support levels, national economic evaluations, macro-partisanship and political measures. Our Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) methodology allows us to predict support for the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats and “other” parties, separately, yet simultaneously, by constraining total support for all parties to 100%. Our model, estimated with data from February 2015, predicts that Labour will win the highest vote share in Great Britain, but that no party will win a majority of seats in parliament.     

From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2010 British general election

This paper outlines and discusses techniques for three stages in forecasting parliamentary seats from British opinion polls: adjusting and aggregating published vote-intention figures from across different polls; forecasting how public opinion might change before election day; and predicting the seat totals from the forecasted election-day vote shares. Specifically, we consider a state-space model for opinion polls which correct for house effects and other sources of survey error, the estimation of the historical relationship between polls and the election-day share of the vote, and a probabilistic approach to predicting the winner in each constituency.     

From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2015 British general election

This paper develops a three-stage method to forecast parliamentary election results from vote preferences in British opinion polls: (1) adjusting and aggregating vote-intentions from different polling organizations; (2) forecasting how public support for parties will change in the period before election day; and (3) translating, through simulations, the forecast of election day vote shares into seat totals while incorporating constituency-level information, including local vote-intention polls. Overall, this approach seeks to combine relevant national, regional and local information, and uncertainty about that information, to better reflect the fragmentation and diversity of political contexts found in the new era of five/six-party British politics.     

Never a dull moment: Pim Fortuyn and the Dutch parliamentary election of 2002

The 2002 parliamentary election in the Netherlands will always be associated with the name of Pim Fortuyn. His murder only nine days before the election was the first political assassination in the Netherlands in more than 300 years. The sudden success of the new party he had founded, coupled with the major losses for the Labour and Liberal parties, made this an historic election. This article attempts to understand the motivations of the voters at this election, in particular the voters of the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF). It is first shown that the conventional wisdom, which assumes voting based on religion and social class, and voting along ideological issue lines, has lost its ability to explain voter behaviour in the Netherlands. An explanation based on retrospective economic voting is also rejected. The success of the LPF is accounted for by the popularity of Fortuyn and his appeal among those who had cynical attitudes towards government or who were dissatisfied with the performance of the incumbent government. The popularity of Fortuyn is shown to have been related to political issues, in particular those relating to asylum seekers and the integration of foreigners in the country.     

Political change and stability of the popularity function: The French general election of 1981

France experienced in May, 1981, a drastic political change, the influence of which on stability of the popularity function, from V. Giscard d'Estaing to F. Mitterrand, is examined here. First, a survey of existing estimates of French popularity functions is presented, and the main problems they raise are briefly discussed. The theoretical effects of government change are then analyzed, with a distinction between global effects (honeymoon and others) and distribution effects; these effects are then linked to the moves of ideologically motivated voters. Finally, new estimates are presented on French data for two periods, the first corresponding to Giscard's tenure only and the second including Mitterrand's tenure. The main conclusion is that the popularity function remained fairly stable, except for a move in the intercept when the Socialists came to power. This move is, in large part, the result of attitudinal changes in the more ideologically oriented electors, as results on disaggregated data indirectly confirm.     

Campaign resources and electoral success: Evidence from the 2002 French parliamentary elections

We examine the factors that improve the candidates’ likelihood of winning an election by drawing on information from campaign resources used by candidates running in the 2002 French parliamentary election. The main effects that we wish to analyze are the candidates’ gender, political affiliation and possible incumbency. We find that the contributions the candidates received and their political affiliations determine their acceding to the second round of the elections. But surprisingly once they make it to the second round, the contributions cease to be relevant; only the candidates’ gender, incumbency and the actual spending rather than the contribution levels matter.     

Policy competition in the 2002 French legislative and presidential elections

Abstract.  The French two-round system of presidential elections forces candidates to choose strategies designed to maximize their votes in two different, potentially conflicting strategic contexts: a first round contest between many candidates, and a second round between (typically) a left- and a right-oriented candidate. Following a constitutional change in 2000, furthermore, presidential elections are synchronized with legislative elections, more tightly linking presidential candidates to the policy platforms of the parties they represent. This article examines the consequences of policy positioning by presidential candidates, measuring, comparing and assessing positioning in the legislative elections and in the first and second presidential election rounds. The measures come from an expert survey taken in 2002, from content analysis of party manifestos and presidential speeches, and from the 2002 French National Election Survey. The findings provide hard empirical confirmation of two commonly perceived propositions: first, that Jospin's first-round loss resulted from strategic error in moving too close to the policy centre, and second, that Chirac's won an overwhelming second-round victory because he collected all of the voters from candidates eliminated in the first round.     

Three million Trotskyists? Explaining extreme left voting in France in the 2002 presidential election

In the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, three million voters (10.4 per cent of the national vote) supported Trotskyist candidates. This unprecedented electoral result has received little academic attention. This study aimed to identify the strongest socio‐demographic and attitudinal predictors of support for the new extreme left in 2002. A multivariate framework was applied in a series of models, using data from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. The study also aimed to understand the rise of the Trotskyists in the context of broader social and political developments. The analysis was grounded in series of hypotheses constituting a model of class voting in postindustrial France. Overall, the analysis tended to confirm the predictions of the model, with younger voters at the lower end of the service sector being the most likely to support the three Trotskyist parties. With regard to attitudes, opposition to economic liberalism proved the strongest single predictor of Trotskyist voting, followed by liberal attitudes on cultural issues, political distrust and political disengagement. However, in terms of economic attitudes, Trotskyist voters still came out as surprisingly close to mainstream left voters. In conclusion, it is argued that models of class voting should reconsider the political role of social class in a postindustrial context, and pay particular attention to the trajectories of different classes over time in terms of changing employment conditions and life chances in order to understand how class is likely to shape party preferences.     

Political Communication and the Unexpected Outcome of the 2002 French Presidential Elections

ABSTRACT

The results of the first round of the 2002 French presidential election were a profound shock. Prime Minister Jospin did not make it to the final round run-off, beaten as he was by the far right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen who claimed second place. This article argues that use (and misuse) of modern campaigning methods proved decisive to this outcome. Paradoxically, Jospin's overtly professional approach actually hindered him. His flawed strategy failed to target crucial voters, and assorted tactical decisions compounded this error. Nor did the media coverage and distorted public opinion polls help a beleaguered Jospin candidacy. In this election the cautious would be the main beneficiaries.     

Critical election and a new party system: Italy after the 2015 regional election

Although party system change has been widely explored, it is less so for the regional level. The article provides the first systematic attempt to discuss party system change at the regional level in Italy. Through a comprehensive overview of the five 1995–2015 regional elections, indicators of party system change, based on an original database, are explored. It will be showed that in the 2013–15 election cycle while party system fragmentation, volatility and recomposition reached their maximum high – parallel to what happened in 1995 – the level of bipolarism, one of the main features of Italian party system since the mid-1990s, dramatically dropped replaced by a three-pole configuration. These results, and their consistency with the relevant junctures at the national level in 1994 and 2013, may allow to state that a party system change at the regional level occurred and thus to consider 2013–15 elections as critical.     

Plurality support for democratic decay: the 2019 Polish parliamentary election

Abstract

The 2019 parliamentary election in Poland resulted in continuity of the incumbent PiS party-coalition. The election saw, for Poland, an unprecedented turnout of 62%. The 44% support for PiS translated into a 51% majority in the Lower House. The ability of the three opposition blocs (KO, SLD and PSL) to coordinate their political campaign for the upper chamber resulted in their victory – PiS lost the majority in the Senate. This post-2019 period thus starts as parliamentary cohabitation. The preceding four years had witnessed repeated violations of the constitution by the government (including attempts to dismantle the separation of powers and to turn public media into a partisan propaganda machine) accompanied by a general anti-liberal and anti-European stance. The electorates of the two major party-blocks have polarized in terms of their socio-demographic features. The new government does not differ much from the pre-election one, with the same PM and most ministers. The first weeks of its governing indicate that the government’s general as well as sectoral policies will be continued, including the controversial, illiberal ones. Finally, the election though free, was unfair, if for no other reason than the simple one of the partisan nature of the public media.