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Election Simulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Howard Rosenthal
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Extract

Like any political institution, the national election can change with external technological innovation. Certainly, election campaign habits have responded to transport and communication developments. The electronic computer, the political statistics available through public opinion survey archives and election statistics, and the existing social science theory now constitute the technological basis for computer simulation and a possible further alteration of the electoral institution.

Type
Simulation in Sociology
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , May 1965 , pp. 21 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1965

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References

(1) Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1964.

(2) Other simulations for state and local elections have been developed in the United States. See McPhee, William, Formal Theories of Mass behavior (New York, The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar; Coleman, James and Waldorf, Frank, “Study of a Voting System with Computer Techniques”Google Scholar, unpublished. In Germany, Rudolf Wildenmann has performed a non-surveybased simulation on the potential effects of different electoral systems for the Federal Republic.

(3) Washington, D. C., has the three remaining votes.

(4) Very exceptionally, there have been minor derogations from this rule.

(5) In American politics, party affiliation is largely a matter of identification that carries none of the dues-paying, membership characteristics of many European parties. All those who are not Democrats (45% in 1960) or Republicans (31%) are termed Independents (24%).

(6) Although the response levels varied in time, tests were conducted that gave some suggestion of linearity across voter-types.

(7) Calculating the correlations and rootmean-square error by weighting each state by its electoral vote does not substantially change these results (letter of Ithiel Pool, February 26, 1965).

(8) Calculated from Candidates, Issues, and Strategies, Table 3.1, pp. 108–109.Google Scholar

(9) Candidates, Issues, and Strategies, p. 117.Google Scholar

(10) Calculated from ibid., pp. 118–121.

(11) Letter of February 26, 1965.

(12) Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N., Voting (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1954).Google Scholar

(13) Note that the equation for Protestant Republicans, by using 1956—the year of the Eisenhower landslide—as a base, does contain an attraction for Nixon.

(14) Candidates, Issues, and Strategies, p. 78.Google Scholar

(15) With the exception of the interaction between party and other factors on issues where the party main effect is large.

(16) Tree analysis of survey data has been suggested by Morgan, James N. and Sonquist, John A., “Problems in the Analysis of Survey Data and a Proposal”, Journal of the American Statistical Association, LVIII (1963), 415–434CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An application of these procedures to French data is contained in Rosenthal, Howard, Contemporary French Politics and Substrata Analysis, unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964).Google Scholar

(17) For 32 Northern states. Candidates, Issues, and Strategies, p. 79.Google Scholar

(18) For 90 departments. For further discussion, see Rosenthal, , op. cit. ch. IV.Google Scholar