Serbia goes to the polls

Serbia's parliamentary elections on 23 December will mark the definitive end of the Slobodan Milosevic era, as Serbia's former opposition consolidates power and takes full control of Serbia's institutions. However, this transition promises to be anything but smooth. The 18-party coalition, whose supporters ousted Milosevic in October, risks collapse after the elections and the tasks facing the incoming government are truly monumental. The new administration will have to grapple with the legacies of a decade of war and isolation, as well as resolve the fundamental question of Serbia's status.     

Winning at the polls and in the polls: the incumbency advantage in surveys of U.S. house voters

The success of House incumbents at the polls is well known and has been studied extensively. This paper focuses on the incumbents' success in the polls: the support bestowed upon incumbents by survey respondents is substantially higher than that received from the voters. The incumbency advantage at the polls, estimated at about 10% in the most recent elections, is almost doubled when measured in the polls. The data, drawn from the 1982–1996 National Election Studies, show that respondents do not reward all winners; candidates elected to open seats have not benefitted from the kind of bounce consistently enjoyed by winning incumbents. In addition, the pattern of respondents' misreports appears to be inconsistent with earlier explanations based on instrument effects. Respondent bias should be accounted for in order to reach correct estimates of the incumbency advantage in individual-level data.     

Public opinion polls on Jews in France and Austria

Harris surveys a number of overlapping debates relating to 'difference' and the 'public/private' distinction, including: positions that perceive differences only as labels to secure governmentality; that treat difference as something to be consumed; that accept but confine difference to the private domain; that attempt to reconcile collective difference to the demands of a liberal theory of individual rights; that counter this by suggesting a need to rethink the relationship between state and society to allow for the creation of multicultural public forms; that insist that the option of difference should be enlarged to embrace the fundamental differences of economic inequality; that would see the appeal to cultural differences as only an ideology that masks the contradictions of modern liberal capitalism; and those, like Harris's own, that want to focus on the multifaceted, interactive and relational nature of difference. Identity and culture, he argues, are achieved processes deriving from a specific praxis of interpretation and enforcement located within the field of historically constituted social relations shaped by grids of meanings, access to resources and power. Once we give up the idea of cultures as sealed entities and recognize that even within cultural boundaries communication is essentially about difference and requires translation, then the problematic nature of the constituent elements of 'multiculturalism' - multi-, -cultural-, -ism - renders the whole concept questionable. Undoubtedly, most avowed multiculturalists are committed to some sense of the 'good' or 'better' society, but it will simply not do to overburden the notion of multiculturalism, however radically conceived and well intentioned, with the task of achieving social justice.     

Union members at the polls in diverse trade union landscapes

This article investigates to what extent social democratic parties still benefit from the support of union members at the polls. Not only are social democratic parties confronted with new competitors in the party systems, but also the union confederations of the socialist labour movement are in some countries losing their dominant position due to the rise of separate professional confederations. It is argued in the article that the effect of union membership on voting choice is conditioned by the structure of the trade union movement. The support of union members for social democracy is fostered by the strength of the confederations historically close to this party family, while it is hampered when strong separate (or politically unaffiliated) white‐collar confederations exist. Using European Social Survey and Swedish Public Opinion data, the article shows that social democratic parties still enjoy important support from trade union members, but at the same time are under fierce competition from bourgeois and green parties among members of white‐collar confederations. This reinforces the challenges for social democracy to build new voters’ coalitions in post‐industrial societies.     

Time inconsistency of monetary policy: Empirical evidence from polls

While the basic model of time inconsistency, put forward by Barro and Gordon (Barro, R. J., & Gordon, D. B. (1983). Journal of Political Economy, 91, 589–610) is widely accepted now, several authors have expressed serious doubts about the empirical relevance of the model in explaining inflation. Interestingly enough, few attempts have been made so far to test for the existence of inflationary biases empirically. Theory predicts a positive correlation between a monetary authority's relative preference for the high employment goal and inflation. Using polling data from six countries as a proxy for public preferences we provide empirical evidence in favor of the Barro-Gordon-model.     

Markets vs. polls as election predictors: An historical assessment

Prediction markets have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting elections. But how accurate are they? Do they outperform the polls, as some scholars argue? Do prices in election markets carry information beyond the horserace in the latest polls? This paper assesses the accuracy of US presidential election betting markets in years before and after opinion polling was introduced. Our results are provocative. First, we find that market prices are far better predictors in the period without polls than when polls were available. Second, we find that market prices of the pre-poll era predicted elections almost on par with polls following the introduction of scientific polling. Finally, when we have both market prices and polls, prices add nothing to election prediction beyond polls. To be sure, early election markets were (surprisingly) good at extracting campaign information without scientific polling to guide them. For more recent markets, candidate prices largely follow the polls.     

From uninformed to informed choices: Voters,pre-election polls and updating

Pre-election opinion poll results for U.S. presidential contests have large variation in the early parts of the primary campaigns, yet pre-election opinion polls later in the campaign are typically within several percentage points of the actual outcome of the contest in November. This paper argues this trend demonstrates that voters are beginning to poll “correctly” – that is, to ascertain their most-preferred candidate. This convergence process is consistent with boundedly rational voters making decisions with low information. We examine the process by which voters can use opinion polls to guide their candidate choice. We undertake a series of laboratory experiments where uninformed voters choose between two candidates after participating in a series of pre-election polls. We demonstrate that voters update their beliefs about candidate locations using information contained in the opinion polls. We compare two behavioral models for the updating process and find significant evidence to support a boundedly rational Bayesian updating assumption. This assumption about the updating process is key to many theoretical results which argue that voters have the potential to aggregate information via a coordination signal and for their beliefs to converge to the true state of the world. This finding also indicates that uninformed voters are able to use pre-election polls to help them make correct decisions.     

Using state polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes

This paper uses pre-election polls to forecast U.S. Presidential election outcomes in the states and the Electoral College. The approach is notable in three ways. First, we employ state-level polls to predict voting outcomes in the states; second, we associate probabilities with alternative election outcomes, and third, we identify states most likely to be pivotal in the Electoral College. Using information available on the day before the election, we estimated that the probability of a Republican victory in the Electoral College in the 2004 election was 47.27%.     

Modeling the influence of polls on elections: a population dynamics approach

We propose a population dynamics model for quantifying the effects of polling data on the outcome of multi-party elections decided by a majority-rule voting process. We divide the population into two groups: committed voters impervious to polling data, and susceptible voters whose decision to vote is influenced by data, depending on its reliability. This population-based approach to modeling the process sidesteps the problem of upscaling models based upon the choices made by individuals. We find releasing poll data is not advantageous to leading candidates, but it can be exploited by those closely trailing. The analysis identifies the particular type of voting impetus at play in different stages of an election and could help strategists optimize their influence on susceptible voters.     

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.     

The verdict in the polls: how government stability is affected by popular support

The idea that the stability of governments is affected by how they are performing in the polls is both intuitive and popular in the literature. When support is low the government might be inclined to replace parties or the prime minister in order to regain support, thus forming a replacement government. Alternatively, a government doing well in the polls might opportunistically try to schedule an early election to capitalise on its favourable prospects. But despite the popularity of the idea, it has thus far not been tested empirically whether government stability is in fact influenced by popular support. This article aims to address this lacuna. Using a relatively new dataset with more than 12,000 unique polls, and recently developed Bayesian models for pooling the polls, it is here shown that government stability is in fact impacted by popular support. Governments display clear signs of electoral opportunism when they are polling well and, conversely, dissolve the government, without calling an election, when polling is bad. The results are strongest when there are few parties in the government, since agreement on the timing for a discretionary termination is easier when fewer players need to agree.     

Success of a tax amnesty: At the polls,for the fisc?

This paper provides a model for analyzing an individual's voting decision on tax amnesty and the change of his reporting behavior given amnesty is granted/rejected. Success at the polls is predicted to increase with higher penalties meted out to detected evaders while success in terms of reporting would be jeopardized. These and other implications of the model are empirically tested for two Swiss tax amnesty proposals, one rejected, the other approved by a majority of citizens/taxpayers.     

政治文明与政治现代化

我们目前讲政治文明研究具有特殊的语境,那就是我国正在进行社会主义现代化建设。政治文明与政治现代化是并行不悖的,但二者并不能等同:政治现代化是政治文明演进的特殊阶段,政治文明是对政治现代化的正向运动的描述,现代化的政治文明是高度分化整合的政治、理性化的政治和民主化的政治。政治文明的特殊语境及其内在规定性决定了我国政治文明建设要以法治为核心,挖掘制度内的政治资源,依法治国,加强和完善人民代表大会制度。