MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson (1992) recently have challenged a long-standing conventional wisdom by claiming that sociotropic prospections dominate presidential approval models. Net of long-term ...expectations about the economy, judgments about its past performance are not significant. However, when nonstationarity in the time series of interest is taken into account, analyses of models similar to MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson's and analyses of an alternative error correction model both indicate that retrospections as well as prospections are influential. They also contend that the electorate forms its economic expectations according to a rational expectations model. This claim is unfounded because their analyses and data are inadequate for assessing it.
The American voter's British cousin Clarke, Harold D.; Sanders, David; Stewart, Marianne C. ...
Electoral studies,
12/2009, Letnik:
28, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
It is now nearly a half century since the publication of
The American Voter. Greeted with wide acclaim, the book quickly exercised enormous influence, not only in the United States, but in many other ...countries as well. One of those countries was Great Britain where the British Election Study (BES) closely modeled on the American National Election Study (ANES) was initiated in 1964. In this paper we present selected findings from two recent books,
Political Choice in Britain (2004) and
Performance Politics and the British Voter (2009) that describe what the BES data collection tells us about forces affecting British voting behavior. A valence politics model featuring valence (not position) issues, party leader images, and flexible partisan attachments has powerful explanatory power. The model also works well in the United States, thereby warranting the inference that the American voter's British cousin is a close relative.
This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from ...the ‘Law of Cubic Proportions’ the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which utilises the seats won by the major parties in the previous general election together with vote intentions six months prior to the general election to forecast seats. The model was reasonably successful in forecasting the 2005 and 2010 general elections, but has to be modified to take into account the ‘regime shift’ which occurred when the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.
•A modified ‘Cube Rule’ is used to forecast seats won in the 2015 election based on data from 1945 to 2010.•The model predicted a hung Parliament with no party having an overall majority of seats, a predictive failure.•We show that part of the predictive failure was due to the fact that the poll data did not capture the vote intentions of those who actually participated in the election.•We also show that the Coalition government represented a ‘regime shift’ in the time series and adjustments for this using an ARIMA model were sufficient to capture the Liberal Democrat seat share providing the party's seat shares in the 2010 Parliament were ignored.
Canada's 23rd general election was held on January 23, 2006. Only
20 months earlier, on June 28, 2004, the governing Liberals—in power
continuously since 1993—had been reduced to a minority in
...Parliament, winning 135 of 308 seats and 37% of the popular vote. Minority
governments in Canada typically have quite short half-lives, and the
Liberal government formed in 2004 was no exception. After narrowly
avoiding defeat on its budget bill in May 2005, the government lost a vote
of confidence in the House of Commons on November 28, and Canadians faced
the prospect of a winter trek to the polls. And, since the holiday season
was fast approaching, Election Day was deferred until late January, making
the campaign an atypically long one by Canadian standards. It also proved
to be a very exciting one.
Anthony Downs' highly influential spatial model of electoral choice assumes that voters' ideological/policy preferences are fixed. This paper uses a national internet experiment conducted in the 2005 ...British Election Study to turn this assumption into a testable hypothesis. Pace Downs, results indicate that voters' preferences are not exogenous, but rather can be influenced by information about the ideological/policy positions of political parties, such as that provided in election campaigns. Voters are attracted by party cues, rather than repelled by them. Information about the positions of party leaders per se is inconsequential. These findings have important implications for the specification of spatial models and the design of national election studies.
Canada's June 28th, 2004, federal election was an exciting and, in several respects a surprising contest. One major surprise was the election campaign itself. Rather than being the predictable, ...boring event many commentators had anticipated, the campaign was a closely fought battle between a longtime governing party and a new opposition party that had been formed only six months before the election was called. A second surprise, at least for some observers, was turnout, with participation in a national election falling to the lowest level in Canadian history. A third, potentially very significant, surprise was the success of the separatist Bloc Québécois, accompanied by a resurgence of support for Quebec sovereignty. After the election, the future of Canada's national party system, indeed, the future of Canadian democracy, appeared more problematic than had been the case only a few months earlier.
This paper uses data gathered in the British Election Study's 2011 AV Referendum Survey to investigate the impact of party leader images on referendum voting. The emphasis on leader images accords ...well with research showing that leader heuristics have sizable effects on voting in major referendums and general elections in Britain and other mature democracies. Reacting to these findings, some analysts have argued that the effects of leader images are heterogeneous, being stronger for voters with lower levels of political knowledge. In contrast, consistent with recent research in experimental economics and political psychology, it can be hypothesized that more knowledgeable voters rely more heavily on leader heuristics than do less knowledgeable individuals. Using multivariate statistical techniques developed for interpreting interaction effects in nonlinear models, analyses indicate that a political knowledge index focusing on the electoral system does not have statistically significant effects on referendum voting. However, voters' knowledge of leaders' positions on AV does interact with leader images. The analyses show that voters with higher levels of political knowledge are influenced more strongly by leader heuristics than are those who are less knowledgeable.
► Use BES CMS data to investigate voting in Britain's 2010 AV referendum. ► Use Ai and Norton's techniques to analyze interaction effects on AV voting. ► Leader image heuristics affect AV voting. ► Knowledge of leaders' positions on AV interacts with leader images. ► Leader heuristics have stronger effects on voting for knowledgeable voters.
This article uses newly available British time-series data to analyze dynamic interrelationships among Labour vote intentions, perceptions that the Labour leader would make the best prime minister, ...and Labour party identification. Error-correction models reveal that best prime minister perceptions and party identification have important short- and long-run influences on vote intentions. Tests of rival models indicate that personal economic expectations outperform other economic evaluations in the vote intention and party identification analyses. National retrospective judgments perform well in analyses of best prime minister perceptions, and emotional reactions to economic conditions significantly influence these perceptions as well as party identification.
After two peaceful alternations of political power in a single decade, Taiwan is a democratic success story, demonstrating levels of party competition, turnout rates and patterns of civic engagement ...similar to those in mature Western democracies. What factors drive electoral choice in Taiwan's new democracy? This paper addresses this question by testing rival models of voting behavior using the Taiwan Elections and Democratization Study (TEDS) 2008 presidential election survey data and the 2010 mayoral election survey data. Analyses show that, similar to their counterparts in mature democracies, Taiwanese voters place more emphasis on the performance of political parties and their leaders in delivering policies designed to address valence issues concerning broadly shared policy goals than on position issues or more general ideological stances that divide the electorate. Findings demonstrating the strength of the valence politics model of electoral choice in Taiwan closely resemble the results of analyses of competing models of voting behavior in Western countries such as Great Britain and the United States.
The present issue of the Political Research Quarterly includes a stimulating new contribution by Darren Davis to the debate concerning the Euro-Barometer (E-B) battery. Davis (2000) argues that the ...measure of materialist and post-materialist values provided by the battery (the MMP variable) has at best only very limited utility for understanding a variety of important political beliefs, attitudes, and opinions in the American electorate. The purpose of the present article is twofold. First, I will comment on selected methodological issues raised by Davis for enhancing understanding of the measurement of values and value change in advanced industrial and other societies. Second, as a party to the values debate, I will discuss my "conversations in context" critique of the E-B values battery and present new, hitherto unpublished, experimental evidence that buttresses the validity of the critique. Like Davis, I argue that the E-B battery is deeply flawed. My story of the failure of the E-B battery illustrates how the structure and content of a survey instrument can interact with the sociopolitical and economic contexts in which interviews occur to mislead analysts. A larger message is that if the history of science is a reliable guide, research questioning the validity of the E-B battery—however well grounded in fact and logic—is likely to have limited impact, until and unless a credible rival theory appears to challenge the value shift thesis.
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