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Publications (129)
This paper argues that estimating causal effects on US Appellate Court panels can be advanced by analyzing the data as a series of natural experiments, fully exploiting the as‐if random assignment of judges to cases. As a template, this paper reanalyzes Boyd et al.'s data on sex‐discrimination cases. The question is the impact on the votes by male...
Significance
Donald Trump's 2016 victory in the Electoral College without leading in the popular vote has led to speculation of a repeat in 2020. If the Democrats were to win the popular vote but by less than a landslide, could they be thwarted from stopping Trump once again? We examine how Electoral College outcomes are conditioned by how states h...
On election eve the presidential vote can be seen fairly clearly from trial-heat polls. Earlier in the election year, polls offer less information about what will happen on Election Day, as they capture preferences to the moment and do not anticipate future changes. We know that the standing of the sitting president will be important and the econom...
We forecast party control of the US House of Representatives after the 2018 midterm election. First, we model the expected national vote relying on available generic Congressional polls and the party of the president. Second, we model the district vote based primarily on results from 2016 and the national swing. To produce our forecast, we incorpor...
Lee (2008) and others have estimated the incumbency advantage in US elections using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). The idea is that very close election outcomes are the equivalent of a randomized coin flip. Caughey and Sekhon (2011) present evidence that this benign interpretation does not hold for US House elections. First, they show evi...
A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts - Volume 50 Issue 2 - James E. Campbell, Helmut Norpoth, Alan I. Abramowitz, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Charles Tien, James E. Campbell, Robert S. Erikson, Christopher Wlezien, Brad Lockerbie, Thomas M. Holbrook, Bruno Jerôme, Véronique Jerôme-Speziari, Andreas Graefe, J. Scott Armstrong, Randall J. Jones, Alfred...
To study the evolution of electoral preferences, Erikson and Wlezien (2012) propose assessing the correspondence between pre-election polls and the vote in a set of elections. That is, they treat poll data not as a set of time series but as a series of cross-sections—across elections—for each day of the election cycle. This “timeline” method does n...
We prepared forecasts of the 2016 presidential vote at different points of the election timeline. Our model contains two variables: (1) the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through quarter 13 of the current presidential term and (2) the incumbent party candidate's share in the most recent trial-heat polls. Our forecast...
Forecasting the Presidential Vote with Leading Economic Indicators and the Polls - Volume 49 Issue 4 - Robert S. Erikson, Christopher Wlezien
Legislative scholars recognize that legislative output is affected by the legislature’s institutional design. Let us assume that the goals are to avoid chaos and to enhance welfare. Toward these goals there are many variations. Strong committees (Shepsle and Weingast 1987), strong ruling parties (Cox and McCubbins 2004), institutions fostering legi...
Many political observers have expressed doubts as to whether America's leaders are up to the task of addressing major policy challenges. Yet much of the critical commentary lacks grounding in the systematic analysis of the core institutions of the American political system including elections, representation, and the law-making process. Governing i...
This article analyzes voting for Congress in presidential election years. The national Democratic vote for the House increases with the Democratic vote for president but decreases with the Democrats' perceived chances of winning the presidency (anticipatory balancing). The evidence for coattails and for balancing become visible only when statistica...
We study the conditions under which a regression discontinuity (RD) design can be used to recover the personal incumbency advantage, a quantity that has long been of interest to political scientists. We offer an expanded interpretation of the RD design that allows us to back out unbiased estimates of this quantity by focusing on open seats-election...
Evaluations of the 2014 Midterm Election Forecasts - Volume 48 Issue 2 - James E. Campbell, Alan I. Abramowitz, Joseph Bafumi, Robert S. Erikson, Christopher Wlezien, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Charles Tien, Benjamin Highton, Eric McGhee, John Sides
It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a pres...
Our forecast, based on information gathered 121 to 180 days out (essentially May and June), is a near-certain Republican hold of the House. In terms of the national vote, the most likely outcome is a Republican plurality of about 52.5% of the two-party vote. Of course, seats are what matter, and by our reckoning, the most likely scenario is a Repub...
The growing concern about economic inequality leads to a similar concern about political inequality. This article explores the seeming contradiction between the literature pointing to inequality in political representation in the United States and the literature showing that public policy does tend to represent public opinion in general. Low-income...
On August 1, 2012, we prepared a forecast of the 2012 presidential vote for PS. Our model contains two variables: (1) the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through quarter 13 of the current presidential term and (2) the incumbent party candidate's share in the most recent trial-heat polls, which were for the month of Ju...
Very often, social scientists still tend to oppose theoretical approaches — including modelling or simulation — in favour of empirical approaches that focus on an observable reality. In Chapter 1, Bruter and Lodge showed that this distinction is not without problems, to the extent that very often a significant focus on conceptual and theoretical th...
It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate is helped in a state by having a governor of the same party. There is however little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design. The idea is that in very close elections the party of the governor is essentially decided by a coin flip. Focusin...
My book "The Macro Polity," coauthored with Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson and published in 2002, depicts the dynamics of public opinion and electoral politics in the United States at the macro level; the analysis is based on micro-level foundations of micro-level political behavior. This essay presents the book's main arguments, in some i...
The importance of the economy in US presidential elections is well established. Voters reward or punish incumbent party candidates based on the state of the economy. The electorate focuses particularly on economic change, not the level of the economy per se, and pays more attention to late-arriving change than earlier change. On these points there...
Prediction markets have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for predicting elections. But how accurate are they? Do they really outperform the polls, as some would have us believe? Do prices in election markets carry information beyond the horserace that is portrayed in the latest polls? And how well do election markets perform w...
We explore problems with the use of dyadic data in international relations. We illustrate these problems by analyzing a central proposition among IR scholars that democracies seek out other democracies as trading partners. Our main contribution is to present randomization tests to infer the correct p-values associated with the trade hypotheses. Our...
In his new book Unequal Democracy, Larry Bartels finds that rich constituents are substantially better represented by the legislators in the US Senate than their poorer counterparts. In fact, the poorest third of the population is not represented at all. While we do not find evidence directly contradictory this result, we add some complications. Fi...
We simulate the results of tournaments in which legislators vie for the role of leader, who sets the legislative agenda to their liking. We show that with multiple dimensions, when all choices for leader are paired against each other, a Condorcet winner is more likely than not. The probability of a Condorcet winner (who defeats all comers in a lead...
This project was undertaken in the framework of an initiative funded by the Information Processing Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aimed at producing models to provide an Integrated Crisis Early Warning Systems (ICEWS) for decision makers in the U.S. defense community. The holding grant is to the Lockheed Martin C...
The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 19...
Based on information available in July, we predicted that the Republicans would receive 52.9% of the total House vote and end up holding 229 seats, gaining control from the Democrats in the process (Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien 2010b). Our national vote forecast proved to be nearly correct, undershooting the actual Republican share (53.8%) by sligh...
Christopher Wlezien is a professor in the political science department and a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University. He can be reached at wlezien@temple.edu.
This paper tests coattail and balancing theories of midterm loss in congressional elections. Neither theory can by itself account for the regularity of midterm loss. But together they can. When, following a close presidential election, there are no coattails to withdraw, ideological balancing at midterm generates a loss for the presidential party....
While scholars disagree about whether and how much campaigns persuade voters, they increasingly agree that campaigns inform voters about the candidates and help voters bring their votes in line with their interests. Some argue that campaigns serve mostly to help voters bring their choices in line with preexisting political predispositions. This pap...
One mystery of U.S. politics is why the president’s party regularly loses congressional seats at midterm. Although presidential coattails and their withdrawal provide a partial explanation, coattails cannot account for the fact that the presidential party typically performs worse than normal at midterm. This paper addresses the midterm vote separat...
This paper offers graphic illustration of so-called “valence” models of candidates responding to their perceptions of voter location in a two-party system. Models by Groseclose and others show how the combination of candidate uncertainty about the median voter location, nonzero candidate valence, and policy motivated candidates leads to departures...
Many hypotheses in U.S. state politics research are multi-level, positing that state-level variables affect individual-level behavior. Unadjusted standard errors for state-level variables are too small, leading to overconfidence and possible false rejection of null hypotheses. Primo, Jacobsmeier, and Milyo (2007) explore this problem in their reana...
Many hypotheses in state politics research are multi-level—they posit that variables observed at the state level affect individual behavior. When standard OLS is used to test hypotheses about state-level effects using individual-level observations, it yields overconfident standard errors and may lead researchers to falsely reject null hypotheses. P...
In 1969, the first Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates, determining which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced opinions about the Vietnam War, party identification, political ideology, and attitudes toward salient political figures and issue...
Why did Obama defeat McCain in 2008? As with any national election outcome, the immediate culprit that comes to mind is economic performance. When the U.S. is prosperous, the electorate votes the incumbent presidential party back into office. When the U.S. economy sours, the incumbent (or incumbent party) loses. In 2008, the application of this rul...
The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.
Prior to the 2008 presidential election we provided forecasts of the final vote relying on a model containing only two variables: (1) the cumulat...
On the eve of the election, the impending result of the presidential vote can be seen fairly clearly from trial-heat polls. Earlier in the election year, the polls offer much less information about what will happen on Election Day (see Campbell 2008; Wlezien and Erikson 2002). The polls capture preferences to the moment and do not—because they cann...
Election markets have been praised for their ability to forecast election
outcomes, and to forecast better than trial-heat polls. This paper
challenges that optimistic assessment of election markets, based
on an analysis of Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) data from presidential
elections between 1988 and 2004. We argue that it is inappropriate
to naiv...
Everybody knows that "the economy" matters in presidential elections, but how can one incorporate economic information in an early forecasting equation? Our economic forecasting tool is the cumulative growth of leading indicators during a presidential term--weighting recent growth most heavily--which provides an early warning, as early as quarter 1...
Recent scholarship has attempted to restore the reputation of the American electorate, even though its level of political interest and information has not measurably increased. Scott Althaus's Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics challenges this revisionist optimism, arguing that opinion polls misrepresent the interests of a large segment...
In just 13 pages, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes's “Constituency Influence in Congress” established the agenda for the next half-century of research on congressional representation. Along with its sister paper, “Party Government and the Salience of Congress” (Stokes and Miller 1962), “Constituency Influence” famously documents the general impoveri...
This chapter examines the changes in the pattern of state mass partisanship and state ideology in the U.S. from the 1980s to the present. The findings reveal strong stability in mass ideology over time and stability of mass partisanship, though with some evident patterns of change. This chapter argues that the changes in state partisanship have bee...
Prior to the 2004 presidential election we provided forecasts of the final vote relying on two different models. The first model follows what we did in 1996 and 2000 and relies on two variables: the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through the 13th quarter of the sitting president's term—March of the election year—whic...
Many new democracies and perhaps even some older democracies do not appear to be functioning as democracies should. Politicians ignore public opinion, go back on their campaign promises, and are not held accountable at elections. The five books under review chart a new research program that addresses these issues. They attempt to measure the presen...
Only in recent years has the "likely voter" technology been extended to polls well in advance of an election. In the case of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, CNN/USA Today/Gallup tracking polls indi- cated considerable fluctuations in likely voter preferences, greater than among the larger pool of registered voters surveyed. This article explor...
As the experience of 2000 shows, forecasting presidential elections is an inexact science. Everybody knows that “the economy” matters, but simple projection from economic conditions at the time of the forecast is not enough. And the most important economic shocks to the economy are the late shocks, which may arrive too late to be measured by the fo...
Many of the findings regarding economic voting derive from the micro-level analyses of survey data, in which respondents' survey evaluations of the economy are shown to predict the vote. This paper investigates the causal nature of this relationship and argues that cross-sectional consistency between economic evaluations and vote choice is mainly i...
Electoral accountability and efficiency of politics in the united states : a counterfactual analysis
We consider how citizen attentiveness to public affairs shapes the character of presidential politics and policymaking. Our analytic tool is an empirically-grounded macro model of US politics, one rooted in data and econometric estimates taken from...
Little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over the campaign cycle. How does the outcome come into focus as the election cycle evolves? Do voters’ preferences evolve in a patterned and understandable way? What role does the election campaign play? In this article, we address these issues. We translate general arguments about the rol...
Do politicians listen to the public? How often and when? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by political and economic elites? Navigating Public Opinion brings together leading scholars of American politics to assess and debate these questions. It describes how the relationship between opinion and policy has changed ove...
Do politicians listen to the public? How often and when? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by political and economic elites? Navigating Public Opinion brings together leading scholars of American politics to assess and debate these questions. It describes how the relationship between opinion and policy has changed ove...
This paper discusses the contribution of the American National Election Studies (ANES) data to the understanding of macro-level election analysis. The paper reviews the theory of the micro–macro connection and presents two brief examples where ANES data are used to explain macro-level variation in election outcomes. It argues that the ANES — indeed...
The major premise of this study is that in federal countries voters can balance and moderate national policy by dividing electoral support between different parties in federal and sub-national elections. We compare the non-concurrent federal and provincial elections in Canada to assess the balancing properties of sub-national elections. The balanci...
In late August 2000, at APSA's Annual Meeting, a panel of political scientists offered forecasts for the 2000 presidential election. Although they differed in particulars, most of the forecasters' models incorporated a measure of economic growth plus the president's approval rating. Because the economy was prospering and President Clinton enjoyed p...
Although scholars debate the influence of election campaigns on electoral decision making, they agree that campaigns do have effects. Empirically identifying the effects of the campaign is not straightforward, however. We simply do not have regular readings of voter preferences over the election cycle, and the readings we do have are imperfect. Cle...
: Bartels (1997) popularizes the procedure of model-averaging (Raftery, 1995, 1997), making some important innovations of his own along the way. He offers his methodology as a technology for exposing excessive specification searches in other peoples' research. As a demonstration project, Bartels applied his version of model-averaging to a portion o...
This paper updates and expands the argument that the US electorate is forward-looking when evaluating presidential performance on the basis of the economy. The electorate's approval of the president depends on its economic expectations regarding the future level of prosperity. More is incorporated in this evaluation than a simple extrapolation from...
This paper updates and expands the argument that the US electorate is forward-looking when evaluating presidential performance on the basis of the economy. The electorate's approval of the president depends on its economic expectations regarding the future level of prosperity. More is incorporated in this evaluation than a simple extrapolation from...
This paper presents a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that has made it di#cult to obtain unbiased estimates of the e#ects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both...
On the eve of the 2000 election, Bush almost certainly will win 24 states worth 210 electoral votes and Gore will almost certainly win 10 others worth 146 electoral votes. This leaves 17 "battleground" states where the vote is thought to be in play. Gore's task is often described as daunting: He must win a major share of these battleground states i...
Acknowledgments:Aggregation,of the CBS News/New York Times polling data was originally funded by NSF grants SES83-10443, SES83-10780, SES86-09397, and SES86-09562. Neither NSF, CBS News/New York Times nor Project Vote Smart is responsible for the interpretations offered here. Gregory Strizek, of the Social Science Data Lab at the University of Colo...
The study of voters and elections has shed considerable light on people's vote choices and election outcomes. Yet little is known about the evolution of electoral sentiment over the campaign cycle. This article takes a small step toward addressing this issue by examining polls for a single election in a single year-the U.S, presidential race in 199...
Contrary to the claim by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (1998), macropartisanship is largely shaped by presidential approval and consumer sentiment. It is not the case, however, that macropartisanship mirrors the ever-changing levels of current presidential popularity and prosperity Rather, macropartisanship reflects the cumulation of political an...
This paper estimates the effects of incumbent spending and challenger spending in U.S. House elections in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper employs FIML simultaneous equations analysis involving instrumental variables as vote predictors, and zero-covariance restrictions for the vote-spending disturbances. This procedure allows the estimation of spendi...
This paper presents a formal game-theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that has made it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in U.S. House elections. The model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by bo...
We use the distribution of responses to the Gallup poll's "generic" House vote question (i.e., "If the elections for Congress were being held today, which party's candidate would you like to see win in your congressional district?") to forecast the Republican-Democratic vote split in presidential year congressional elections. Although these respons...
In this article we present a simple forecasting model that has been successful at predicting past presidential elections. The two variables included in the model are cumulative per capita income growth and presidential approval. These "fundamental" variables predict the vote especially well when measured shortly in advance of the election, when the...
How far in advance can one predict the next presidential election? Forecasting as late as election eve is trivially easy, at least since the advent of polling. Forecasting as early as two or four years in advance is virtually impossible (see, e.g., Norpoth 1995). It is at some time between the previous midterm election and election day that elector...
This article challenges Radcliff's recent claim that state-level voter turnout strongly influences state-level vote divisions for president. It is demonstrated that Radcliff's claim is an artifact of ignoring the contribution of the Voting Rights Act to southern electoral politics. When the analysis is restricted to nonsouthern states, least square...
If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts of elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government's political composition, which is th...
This study looks at the impact of state party elite ideology in American state politics. Drawing on the spatial theory of Anthony Downs, we develop hypotheses first to explain the non-convergence of candidates. Party elites are ideologically distinct, influential and strongly policy motivated. They are a force pulling candidates away from the avera...
In a world where citizens desire to have their preferences reflected in public policy and, for instrumental reasons, policy makers share that desire, the linkage of opinion to policy still faces formidable problems. Chief among these is this: policy making is highly specific, detailed, and informed, while mass electorates choose not to attend close...