Campaign activities and state election outcomes

This research first clusters campaign activities in state legislative elections into five empirically justified and conceptually meaningful clusters: direct attempts to persuade voters, obtaining the support of other elites, attempts to increase turnout, seeking endorsements from other political officials, and fund raising. Indices created from these clusters are then compared to the situational factors of incumbency and competition as predictors of election outcomes. Data are surveys of candidates for the Louisiana legislature in which they were asked about the conduct of their campaigns and their relative emphasis on various activities. Incumbency was by far the best predictor of what percentage of the vote a candidate obtained, and in open seat contests, expenditures and competition best predicted outcome. Overall, the campaign activities had very little relationship to outcome when controlling for situational factors. Variations occurred between the House and Senate races with implications for challengers' strategies and campaign financing.     

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.     

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.     

Explaining the Decision to Withdraw from a U.S. Presidential Nomination Campaign

We contend that a candidate’s decision to exit from a U.S. presidential nomination campaign is a function of three sets of considerations: the potential for profile elevation, party-related costs, and updated perceptions of competitiveness. We analyze data from eleven post-reform presidential nomination campaigns and find support for all three considerations. Specifically, our results suggest that in addition to candidates’ competitiveness, the decision to withdraw is a function of candidates’ closeness to their party and ability to raise their profile. At the same time, some of our results contradict the conventional wisdom regarding presidential nomination campaigns, as we find no evidence that media coverage or cash on hand directly affect the duration of a nomination candidacy.     

Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

A simple ``Bread and Peace'' model shows that aggregate votes forPresident in postwar elections were determined entirely byweighted-average growth of real disposable personal income percapita during the incumbent party's term and the cumulativenumbers of American military personnel killed in action as aresult of U.S. intervention in the Korean and Vietnamese civilwars. The model is subjected to robustness tests against twenty-two variations in functional form inspired by the extensiveliterature on presidential voting. Not one of these variationsadds value to the Bread and Peace model or significantly perturbsits coefficients.     

The 2020 U.S. presidential election: A litmus test

This paper provides an overview of what lies ahead of the United States in the event that Donald John Trump either lost or won a reelection bid. The uncertainty of the election outcomes is what we refer to as a litmus test. In this paper, we reflect on the ongoing events shaping the United States ahead of the 2020 presidential election and their implications on the United States. We suggest that the election provide a litmus test in shaping the politics of the United States in answering numerous questions raised in the current Trump administration. We deduce that the election could give birth to the new form of Brexit in the form of “U.S. exit” in the event the United States ignores processes that foster institutional legitimacy and civic engagement to build lost “trust” in the Americanized system.     

Floating policy voters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

Much of the political science literature is skeptical that issue content matters for presidential voting behavior, with partisanship, social identity, and group attitudes providing the vast majority of explanatory power for two-party vote choice at the individual level. This literature stands in contrast with work on issue cross-pressuring, which argues that voters who disagree with their party on salient issues they care about are more likely to either vote for the opposing party's candidate or not participate in the two-party contest at all. Using the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project's 2016 survey, which includes within-subject responses from early June and November–December of 2016, I find support for both of these literatures in the context of the 2016 presidential election. Group attitudes, particularly with respect to race, were strongly associated with changes in voting behavior between 2012 and 2016. However, some voters, in some cases, seem to have deviated from their 2012 voting behavior based on policy issues they considered important to their vote. While issue cross-pressuring as measurable on the 2016 CCAP was relatively rare, I find that those who were cross-pressured were significantly more likely to change their voting behavior in 2016 relative to 2012.     

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.     

The conditioning role of polarization in U.S. senate election outcomes: A direct-election era & voter-level analysis

Recent work finds that a decline in the incumbency advantage coincides with the rise of partisanship as a determinant of congressional electoral outcomes. While this work updates our view of congressional elections, it is unclear if this holds in the more candidate-centered and high-information electoral context of the U.S. Senate. In this paper, I address these two considerations by evaluating a theory positing that polarization conditions the influence of incumbency and partisanship as Senate election determinants. Using data on the entire direct-election Senate era and survey data, this paper finds that: (1) polarization provides a partisan advantage for candidates running in states in which they are members of the partisan majority and (2) polarization positively conditions the incumbency advantage for Senators representing states that favor the other party. These findings suggest that Senators may still successfully cultivate a personal brand in the face of growing ideological differences between the parties.     

Correct Voting in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Nominating Elections

Criticisms of the system by which the American political parties select their candidates focus on issues of representativeness—how choices are dominated by relatively small numbers of ideologically extreme primary voters, or how residents of small states voting early in the process have disproportionate influence. This paper adds a different concern, albeit one that still addresses representativeness. How well do primary and caucus voters represent their own values and interests with their vote choices? Lau and Redlawsk’s notion of “correct voting” is applied to the 2008 U.S. nominating contests. Four reasons to expect levels of correct voting to be lower in caucus and primary elections than in general election campaigns are discussed. Results suggest that voters in U.S. nominating contests do much worse than voters in general election campaigns, often barely doing better than chance in selecting the candidate who best represents their own values and priorities. Discussion focuses on institutional reforms that should improve citizens’ ability to make correct voting choices in caucuses and primaries.     

Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States

Examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of presidential voting and electoral coalitions rely on national samples (e.g., the American National Election Studies). However, recent developments in the state party and electoral change literature suggest variation across the United States in the group bases of political coalitions and in the process of electoral adjustment. Moreover, the strategic implications of the electoral college suggest a focus on state electorates. We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states. Our results reveal noteworthy variation in the nature of group influences on presidential voting, in the composition of presidential electoral coalitions, and in cleavage structures across the states. This mapping exercise suggests limitations in theoretical and empirical accounts of presidential voting, political cleavage, and electoral change that do not accommodate the geopolitical diversity of the United States.     

Terrorism,gender, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election

The 2016 U.S. election provides the opportunity to assess how gender, party, and experience shape candidate evaluations when terrorist threat is elevated. The presidential contest featured the first woman major party nominee (Hillary Clinton), a major party nominee without political experience (Donald Trump), and terrorism was salient. We argue that security threats dampen public confidence in Democratic women running for office, yet an experience advantage could countervail against those tendencies. We test expectations using the 2016 ANES and two experimental studies. We first affirm that individuals worried about terrorism held lower evaluations of Clinton and higher evaluations of Trump. We then test an active manipulation of the salience of national security experience and find that it mitigates Clinton's disadvantage, but only in the absence of a counter-message. The results underscore the difficulty that Democratic women face in overcoming the negative influence of party and gender stereotypes when running for office in times of terrorist threat.     

Introduction: The 2016 U.S. presidential election and its understated stability

The articles in this special section analyze the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. While the election has been referred to as historic, voting data instead emphasize its underlying stability. The articles in this section explore four broad themes in the raised in the election: issues, media, candidates, and pluralism. Together, these papers help examine the implications of stable voting patterns electing a candidate favoring disruption.     

On expressive voting: Evidence from the 1988 U.S. presidential election

People turn out to cast their votes simply because they want to ``cheer'' or ``boo'' their favored or unfavored candidates. This expressive voting behavior is in marked contrast to the instrumental voting behavior, i.e., people vote because they perceive voting as a means of achieving a particular election outcome. In this paper we report an econometric study on voting behavior that uses data from the 1988 American National Election Study. The results reveal that the ``cheering'' and ``booing'' effects are statistically significant, and that they exert substantial influence on bothturnout and voter choice. We also obtain evidence against theproposition that people turn out to vote because they considerthemselves to be potentially decisive with regard to the electionoutcome.     

An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting —the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system.     

Negative and Positive Partisanship in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections

Political Behavior - Negative partisanship captures the notion that disdain for the opposing party is not necessarily accompanied by strong in-party attachments. Yet, lack of a theoretical...     

The influence of state-level economic conditions on the 1992 U.S. presidential election

Evidence is found that state-level economic conditions played a significant role in the defeat of George Bush in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. Evidence is also found which indicates that the entrance of Ross Perot into the race as an independent candidate was not instrumental in the Bush loss.