Mary Stegmaier

• Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2000
• Vice Provost for International Programs and Professor at University of Missouri

Economic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic per...

Most citizens correctly forecast which party will win a given election, and such forecasts usually have a higher level of accuracy than voter intention polls. How do citizens do it? We argue that social networks are a big part of the answer: much of what we know as citizens comes from our interactions with others. Previous research has considered o...

Representative democracy requires the consent of the governed. But what drives public support for government? This book provides the most comprehensive treatment of approval dynamics in the advanced democracies to date. Drawing on data from the Executive Approval Project (EAP), a cross-nationally comparable data set on leader popularity, authors ex...

In democracies, we elect our political leaders by choosing among a rival set of candidates or parties. What makes us pick one over all the others? Do we carefully weigh the plat­ forms of all the candidates and then select the one closest to our personal desires? Or, do we select the candidate our friends and neighbors recommend? Perhaps, even, to...

This Special Issue presents a wide array of election forecasting models for the 2024 US elections. Most of these models generate forecasts for the presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial races. The contributions are characterized by the variety of their approaches: citizen forecasting, electronic markets, large language models, machine learn...

Objective Using the complementary 2012 American National Election Study and 2012 Latino Immigrant National Election Study, we examine Latino political participation by citizenship and immigrant generation status. Methods We use logistic regression to examine three political participation modes—voting, campaign activity, and civic participation—acr...

In 2010, an analysis of the top 50 political science journals showed that women were reasonably well represented as editors, associate editors, and board members compared to their numbers as senior faculty at PhD-granting institutions. As the presence of women in the profession has increased, have women kept up in these editorial positions? Overall...

Citizens, especially in the aggregate, have historically been excellent election forecasters. This is, in part, due to discussing and hearing about the voting intentions of those around them, i.e., learning from their social networks. However, many people interact with networks that are ideological “echo chambers” made up of only likeminded voters....

In flexible-list proportional representation systems, where voters are allowed to cast candidate preference votes, parties have much control over which candidates win seats. The influence of both party ballot rankings and preference votes, begs the question of whether more active legislators who seek reelection are rewarded by voters. We test this...

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? The authors address this question by comparing eight forecasting models for British general elections: one based on voters' expectations of who will win and seven based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including ‘uniform national swing m...

The popularity function literature has traditionally focused on incumbent government support, even under coalition governments. Here, we shift the focus from the government to the parties. To what extent are German parties held accountable for economic conditions when they hold the Chancellorship, serve in coalition, or sit in opposition? Using See...

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? We address this question by comparing predictive models for British elections: one based on voters' expectations of who will win and others based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including " cube rule " and uniform national swing models)...

Economic-based voting blocs are groups of people who share common economic interests based on their position in the economy. For these groups to become “voting blocs,” political parties must distinguish themselves in their economic policy positions, and a party must appeal to the interests of the group. When this happens, scholars study whether the...

"Economic judgment" refers to how people evaluate their personal financial wellbeing and the economic situation in their community or nation. These judgments assess how conditions have changed over time and what they expect will happen in the future. Citizens might also compare the situation in their country to how well the economy in other countri...

The popularity function literature has traditionally focused on incumbent government support, even under coalition governments. Here, we shift the focus from the government to the parties. To what extent are German parties held accountable for economic conditions when they hold the Chancellorship, serve in coalition, or sit in opposition? Using See...

Do different types of preferential-list PR systems create different incentives for how Members of Parliament vote? To examine this, we compare the quasi-list system of Poland, where only preference votes determine which candidates win seats, to the flexible-list system in the Czech Republic, where the 5 percent preference vote threshold required to...

Most citizens correctly forecast which party will win the election, usually with greater accuracy than voter intention polls. How do they do it? We argue that social networks are a big part of the answer: much of what we know as citizens comes from our communication with others. Previous research has considered only indirect characteristics of soci...

In their classic 1960 work, Angus Campbell and his colleagues offer a model to explain political behavior. They posit a funnel of causality, whereby the causal flow moved from remote long-term forces, such as socio-demographics and party identification, to more immediate short-term forces, such as issues and candidates, finally arriving at the vote...

Voters evaluate economic conditions and use these assessments to hold the incumbent government accountable at election time. Voters typically assign credit or blame for the economic situation to the government leader, the President or Prime Minister, and his or her political party. This assignment of responsibility is easy for voters when the locus...

How do voters in preferential-list PR (PLPR) systems make their candidate choices after selecting their party? We study this question in Poland and the Czech Republic, which use PLPR with different rules to elect the lower house of their national parliaments. In Poland, the system obligates voters to select one candidate from their preferred party,...

The popularity function literature has traditionally focused on incumbent government support, even under coalition governments. Here, we shift the focus from the government to the parties. To what extent are German parties held accountable for economic conditions when they hold the Chancellorship, serve in coalition, or sit in opposition? Using See...

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....

In democratic nations, elections are premier political events. They require citizens to choose their leaders and leaders to be held accountable. The winners of an electoral contest are allowed to wield power, sometimes great power. Therefore, citizens follow campaigns with interest and are often eager to know who will win. In other words, they woul...

Nannestad and Paldam (Public Choice 79:213–245, 1994) published herein an extremely influential review of the literature linking economics and elections, what they called the “VP functions.” In that work, they offered a number of conclusions, in proposition form, about the state of the evidence in this field. We present the key ones (16 in all), an...

While there is plenty of empirical research on the determinants of voting behaviour in German elections, studies that focus on the perceived economic performance between two elections on voter’s decision making are scare. In this paper, we shed light on the impact of economic voting in federal elections for the German parliament. We argue that, f...

Election forecasting appeals to a basic human urge to peek into the future. Ever since elections were invented to choose leaders, humans have been tempted to find ways that would tell them with some degree of certainty who would win an election. The highly quantitative nature of elections aids them in such an endeavor. Few phenomena of interest to...

The U-shaped trajectory of women’s parliamentary representation in Central and Eastern Europe over the post-communist era has generated interest among scholars and non-governmental organizations. One particularly interesting case of the recent increase in women’s parliamentary representation can be found in the Czech Republic. After the initial pos...

Western democracies, with their increasingly diverse racial and ethnic populations, are seeing more political candidates who are non-white. How do these non-white candidates fare at the ballot box? Does their non-white status mean they gain or lose votes? Do their challengers gain or lose votes? In recent work on the US case, it appears that candid...

Although the overall representation of women in the field of political science has increased gradually over the last several decades, most gains are being achieved at junior levels. When considering the status of women in the profession, it is instructive to incorporate information on the presence of women in editorial positions at top-ranked polit...

While economic voting studies exist for the new democracies in post-communist Europe, time-series vote functions are scarce. Here, we fill this void by testing how public support for the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) responds to political shocks and economic oscillations, using monthly data from 2002 to 2009 (N = 83). As the economy fluctuates,...

The leading approaches to election forecasting have been statistical models, prediction markets, or vote intention polls. This paper explores a different, little used approach - citizen forecasting - a method never yet tried for the case of the United Kingdom. Citizen forecasting simply asks voters in a scientific pre-election survey who they think...

That The American Voter has had, and continues to have, a profound influence on the Study of political behavior goes without saying. However, that influence has not touched all its subfields. Oddly, it has had next to no impact in investigations of economic voting. This Peculiarity is striking, because the book has an extensive chapter on the topic...

Although Hungary is a new democracy, the behavior of its voters can be understood. They are systematically responsive to economic conditions, particularly unemployment. We find that the Hungarian electorate, as economic voters, has moved from a policy‐oriented to an incumbency‐oriented strategy. That is, in early elections, they favored the Sociali...

Twenty years after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) continues to garner public support and maintains its presence in parliament. The party's endurance is surprising given the country's relative economic success and the presence of a strong Social Democratic Party. While the literature on...

The relatively low voter turnout rates in the June 2004 European Parliamentary elections in many of the post-communist states surprised observers. While the average turnout rate for these new-EU member states barely surpassed 30%, turnout exhibited much variance at the national and sub-national levels. In this article, we study the economic and pol...

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This article looks at the economic models of voting and the most studied cases of economic voting. It shows how the studies presented in the article were selected. The next section then identifies the most studied cases in the United States, Great Britain, and France. After discussing single-country studies, the article then turns to studies that e...

The relatively low voter turnout rates in the June 2004 European Parliamentary elections in many of the post-communist states surprised observers. While the average turnout rate for these new-EU member states barely surpassed 30%, turnout exhibited much variance at the national and sub-national levels. In this article, we study the determinants of...

Russians today enjoy freedoms and opportunities unknown to previous generations. However, when economic shock therapy commenced in 1992 certain societal groups faced distinct disadvantages. Because women encountered discrimination in hiring, were more likely to be laid off, and government propaganda encouraged them to return to their traditional ro...

For advanced democracies, models of electoral behavior are rather well developed. However, such models may explain only a part of electoral behavior in new democracies. In particular, they seem poorly suited to the emerging, post-socialist democracies, where the vote choice involves fundamental national economic and political variables. While the n...

In this article a second look is taken at the effect that national conditions have on individual U.S. Senate elections. In doing so, the effects that presidential popularity, aggregate national economic conditions, and short-term party evaluations have had on individual Senate contests from 1980 through 1996 are examined. In addition to assessing t...

The relationship between the economy and approval ratings has received an abundance of attention since the 1970s (Nannestad and Paldam, 1994; Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier 2000). This literature shows that economic downturns (typically measured by unemployment and inflation) have a detrimental impact on government/presidential popularity. Strangely, ver...