Marco A. Morales

Columbia University | CU · Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences M.A. Program

The literature on economic voting —which relates the state of the economy to vote choice— operates under the assumption that voters can and do assign responsibility to candidates and parties on the ballot for economic conditions. Yet, the validity of this notion has not been fully explored to date. The few previous studies on this matter have only...

This article proposes a more nuanced method to assess the accuracy of preelection polls in competitive multiparty elections. Relying on data from the 2006 and 2012 presidential campaigns in Mexico, we illustrate some shortcomings of commonly used statistics to assess survey bias when applied to multiparty elections. We propose the use of a Kalman f...

Despite the presence of the so-called Great Recession in the United States, a typical study of vote choice in the 2008 Presidential Election would (falsely) find little evidence that voters cared about the future state of the economy in determining their vote choice. We argue that this result is due to measurement error in the survey question used...

Why have mixed results been found in assessing the impact of prospective economic expectations on vote choice? This paper offers an answer and an improved test of prospective economic voting (PEV) using newly designed 2008 ANES questions. We assert that conflicting results in previous work are a product of severe measurement error in the standard q...

This article pays attention to classic and recent work on economic voting at both the individual level and in the aggregate. It first presents the question of pocketbook versus sociotropic voting. The first major attempt to understand the mechanism causing the observed relationship between the state of the economy and voting was the attempt to disc...

Over a decade ago, Jorge Castañeda wrote the classic Utopia Unarmed, which offered a penetrating and comprehensive account of the Latin American left’s fate at the end of the Cold War. Since then, the left across Latin America has travelled in paths no one could have predicted. Latin American nations from Mexico to Argentina wavered for years betwe...

Why have mixed results been found in assessing the impact of prospective economic expectations on vote choice? This paper offers an answer and a solution. We argue that the standard prospective economic expectation survey question -"how will the economy perform over the next 12 months?" -contains an unacceptably large degree of measurement error. I...

This paper seeks to continue a line of research on split-ticket voting and suggests two alter-ative hypothesis that might shed new light on this phenomenon. Departing from simultaneous-choice explanations, I test whether split-ticket votes can be a consequence of economic per-formance evaluations for the incumbent on the Executive (Economic Voting...

The aftermath of the 2006 federal election in Mexico has been turbulent, to say the least. We argue that this is the result of conducting an election using 1996 electoral rules and pre-1996 institutions. Based on these results, the future success of Mexican democracy rests, first, upon recognizing the need to couple electoral and institutional refo...

Exit polls are seldom used for voting behavior research despite the advantages they have compared to pre and post-election surveys. Exit polls reduce potential biases and measurement errors on reported vote choice and other political attitudes related to the time in which mea-surements are taken. This is the result of collecting information from ac...