Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:01:52.316Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are election results more unpredictable? A forecasting test

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2019

Richard Nadeau ,
Ruth Dassonneville ,
Michael S. Lewis-Beck  and
Philippe Mongrain
Richard Nadeau
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Montréal, H3T 1N8, Canada
Ruth Dassonneville*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Montréal, H3T 1N8, Canada
Michael S. Lewis-Beck
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA52242, United States
Philippe Mongrain
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Montréal, H3T 1N8, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Changes in voters' behavior and in the campaign strategies that political parties pursue are likely to have increased the importance of campaigns on voters' electoral choices. As a result, scholars increasingly question the usefulness and predictive power of structural forecasting models, that use information from “fundamental” variables to make an election prediction several months before Election Day. In this paper, we empirically examine the expectation that structural forecasting models are increasingly error-prone. For doing so, we apply a structural forecasting model to predict elections in six established democracies. We then trace the predictive power of this model over time. Surprisingly, our results do not give the slightest indication of a decline in the predictive power of structural forecasting models. By showing that information on long-term factors still allows making accurate predictions of electoral outcomes, we question the assumption that campaigns matter more now than they did in the past.

Keywords

Elections and campaignsvoting behavior
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 764 - 771
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bartels, LM (2002) Beyond the running tally: partisan bias in political perceptions. Political Behavior 24, 117–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bélanger, É and Soroka, S (2012) Campaigns and the prediction of election outcomes: can historical and campaign-period prediction models be combined? Electoral Studies 31, 702–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bischof, D (2017) New graphic schemes for Stata: plotplain and plottig. The Stata Journal 17, 748–759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Box-Steffensmeier, J, Dillard, M, Kimball, D and Massengill, W (2015) The long and short of it: the unpredictability of late deciding voters. Electoral Studies 39, 181–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, JE (2005) The fundamentals in US presidential elections: public opinion, the economy and incumbency in the 2004 presidential election. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 1, 73–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, JE (2012) Forecasting the 2012 American National Elections. PS: Political Science and Politics 45, 610–613.Google Scholar
Costa Lobo, M (2006) Short-term voting determinants in a young democracy: leader effects in Portugal in the 2002 legislative elections. Electoral Studies 25, 270–286.Google Scholar
Dalton, RJ and Wattenberg, MP (2002) Parties without Partisans. Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dassonneville, R (2013) Questioning generational replacement. An age, period and cohort analysis of electoral volatility in the Netherlands, 1971–2010. Electoral Studies 32, 37–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dassonneville, R, Hooghe, M and Vanhoutte, B (2012) Age, period and cohort effects in the decline of party identification in Germany: an analysis of a two decade panel study in Germany (1992–2009). German Politics 21, 209–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G and Tilley, J (2012) The depoliticization of inequality and redistribution: explaining the decline of class voting. The Journal of Politics 74, 963–976.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fieldhouse, E, Green, J, Evans, G, Mellon, J, Prosser, C, Schmitt, H and van der Eijk, C (2018) Electoral Shocks. The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fournier, P, Nadeau, R, Blais, A, Gidengil, E and Nevitte, N (2004) Time-of-voting decision and susceptibility to campaign effects. Electoral Studies 23, 661–681.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, A and King, G (1993) Why are American presidential election campaign polls so variable when votes are so predictable. British Journal of Political Science 23, 409–451.Google Scholar
Hersh, ED (2015) Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jennings, W and Wlezien, C (2018) Election polling errors across time and space. Nature Human Behavior 2, 276–283.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johann, D, Kleinen-von, K, Kritzinger, S and Thomas, K (2018) Intra-campaign changes in voting preferences: the impact of media and party communication. Political Communication 35, 261–286.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knutsen, O (2004) Religious denomination and party choice in Western Europe: a comparative longitudinal study from eight countries, 1970–97. International Political Science Review 25, 97–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreiss, D (2016) Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lees-Marshment, J (2014) Political Marketing. Principles and Applications. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis-Beck, MS (2005) Election forecasting: principles and practice. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7, 145–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis-Beck, MS and Tien, C (2018) Candidates and campaigns: how they alter forecasts. Electoral Studies 54, 303–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis-Beck, MS, Nadeau, R and Bélanger, É (2004) General election forecasts in the United Kingdom: a political economy model. Electoral Studies 23, 279–290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis-Beck, MS, Jacoby, WG, Norpoth, H and Weisberg, HF (2008) The American Voter Revisited. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipset, SM and Rokkan, S (1967) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Nadeau, R and Lewis-Beck, MS (2012) Does a presidential candidate's campaign affect the election outcome? Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting 24, 15–18.Google Scholar
Nadeau, R, Lewis-Beck, M and Bélanger, É (2009) Election forecasting in the United Kingdom: a two-step model. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 19, 333–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norpoth, H, Lewis-Beck, MS and Lafay, J (1991) Economics and Politics: The Calculus of Support. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Schmitt-Beck, R and Partheymüller, J (2015) Why voters decide late: a simultaneous test of old and new hypotheses at the 2005 and 2009 German federal elections. German Politics 21, 299–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vavreck, L (2009) The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. Princeton (NJ): University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walczak, A, van der Brug, W and de Vries, CE (2012) Long- and short-term determinants of party preferences: inter-generational differences in Western and East Central Europe. Electoral Studies 31, 273–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wlezien, C and Erikson, RS (2012) The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Zaller, J (1989) Bringing Converse back in: modeling information flow in political campaigns. Political Analysis 1, 181–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Nadeau et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MJKDYS
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Nadeau et al. supplementary material

Nadeau et al. supplementary material 1

Download Nadeau et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 225.7 KB