Correcting for survey effects in pre‐election polls

Pre‐election polls can suffer from survey effects, causing biases in forecasted election outcomes. We advocate a simple methodology to estimate the magnitude of survey effects, by collecting data both before and after the election. This method is illustrated by means of a field study with data concerning the 2009 European Parliament elections in the Netherlands. Our study provides empirical evidence of significant positive survey effects with respect to voter participation, especially for individuals with low intention to vote. For our data, the overall survey effect on party shares is small. This effect can be more substantial, for example, if political orientation and voting intention are correlated in the sample.     

Polls to probabilities: Comparing prediction markets and opinion polls

The forecasting of election outcomes is a hugely popular activity, and not without reason: the outcomes can have significant economic impacts, for example on stock prices. As such, it is economically important, as well as of academic interest, to determine the forecasting methods that have historically performed best. However, the forecasts are often incompatible, as some are in terms of vote shares while others are probabilistic outcome forecasts. This paper sets out an empirical method for transforming opinion poll vote shares into probabilistic forecasts, and then evaluates the performances of prediction markets and opinion polls. We make comparisons along two dimensions, bias and precision, and find that converted opinion polls perform well in terms of bias, while prediction markets are good for precision.     

Regional heterogeneity and U.S. presidential elections: Real-time 2020 forecasts and evaluation

This paper exploits cross-sectional variation at the level of U.S. counties to generate real-time forecasts for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The forecasting models are trained on data covering the period 2000–2016, using high-dimensional variable selection techniques. Our county-based approach contrasts the literature that focuses on national and state level data but uses longer time periods to train their models. The paper reports forecasts of popular and electoral college vote outcomes and provides a detailed ex-post evaluation of the forecasts released in real time before the election. It is shown that all of these forecasts outperform autoregressive benchmarks. A pooled national model using One-Covariate-at-a-time-Multiple-Testing (OCMT) variable selection significantly outperformed all models in forecasting the U.S. mainland national vote share and electoral college outcomes (forecasting 236 electoral votes for the Republican party compared to 232 realized). This paper also shows that key determinants of voting outcomes at the county level include incumbency effects, unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, house price changes, and international competitiveness. The results are also supportive of myopic voting: economic fluctuations realized a few months before the election tend to be more powerful predictors of voting outcomes than their long-horizon analogs.     

Does Direct Democracy Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence from the 2004 General Election

Abstract . This empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the “rational voter model” so as to include the potential effects of “direct democracy” on the voter participation rate. Direct democracy is assumed to take two forms: initiatives and popular referenda. This study tests the hypothesis that direct democracy may not on balance significantly affect voter turnout because, although it may elevate the expected gross benefits of voting by “empowering voters,” the transactions/information costs correlative with direct democracy raise the costs of voting. Using cross‐section analysis for the 50 states for the 2004 general election, this study finds that the existence of initiatives and/or referenda does not significantly influence voter turnout.     

Modeling voter choice to predict the final outcome of two-stage elections

Most election forecasting research to date has been conducted in the context of single-round elections. However, more than 40 countries in the world employ a two-stage process, where actual voting data are available between the first and the second rounds to help politicians understand their position in relation to each other and to voter preferences and to help them predict the final outcome of the election. In this study we take advantage of the theoretical foundation on voter behavior from the political science literature and the recent methodological advances in choice modeling to develop a Nested Logit Factor Model of voter choice which we use to predict the final outcome of two stage elections and gain insights about the underlying political landscape. We apply the proposed model to data from the first stage and predict the final outcome of two stage elections based on the inferences made from the first stage results. We demonstrate how our proposed model can help politicians understand their competitive position immediately after the first round of actual voting and test its predictive accuracy in the run-off election across 11 different state governorship elections.     

Forecasting government support in Irish general elections: Opinion polls and structural models

Election forecasting is a cottage industry among pollsters, the media, political scientists, and political anoraks. Here, we plow a fresh field in providing a systematic exploration of election forecasting in Ireland. We develop a structural forecast model for predicting incumbent government support in Irish general elections between 1977 and 2020 (the Iowa model). We contrast this structural model with forecasts from opinion polls, the dominant means of predicting Ireland’s elections to date. Our results show that with appropriate lead-in time, structural models perform similarly to opinion polls in predicting government support when the dependent variable is vote share. Most importantly, however, the Iowa model is superior to opinion polls in predicting government seat share, the ultimate decider of government fate in parliamentary systems, and especially significant in single transferable vote (STV) systems where vote and seat shares are not always in sync. Our results provide cumulative evidence of the potency of structural electoral forecast models globally, with the takeaway that the Iowa model estimating seat share outpaces other prediction approaches in anticipating government performance in Irish general elections.     

Playing the synthesizer with Canadian data: Adding polls to a structural forecasting model

Election forecasting has become a fixture of election campaigns in a number of democracies. Structural modeling, the major approach to forecasting election results, relies on ‘fundamental’ economic and political variables to predict the incumbent’s vote share usually a few months in advance. Some political scientists contend that adding vote intention polls to these models—i.e., synthesizing ‘fundamental’ variables and polling information—can lead to important accuracy gains. In this paper, we look at the efficiency of different model specifications in predicting the Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 2015. We find that vote intention polls only allow modest accuracy gains late in the campaign. With this backdrop in mind, we then use different model specifications to make ex ante forecasts of the 2019 federal election. Our findings have a number of important implications for the forecasting discipline in Canada as they address the benefits of combining polls and ‘fundamental’ variables to predict election results; the efficiency of varying lag structures; and the issue of translating votes into seats.     

Social networks and citizen election forecasting: The more friends the better

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 only indirect characteristics of social networks when analyzing why citizens are good forecasters. We use a unique German survey and consider direct measures of social networks in order to explore their role in election forecasting. We find that three network characteristics –  size, political composition, and frequency of political discussion – are among the most important variables when predicting the accuracy of citizens’ election forecasts.     

Voter turnout in a multidimensional policy space

Many factors influence the likelihood of citizens turning out to vote. In this paper we focus our attention on issue voting, that is, on the likelihood that different policies offered by politicians affect the probability of voting. If voters consider both the benefits and the costs of voting, rational voters will only vote when politicians offer differentiated policies. In a multidimensional policy space this implies that citizens only vote when they perceive enough difference on the issues they care about the most. We investigate the role of voter abstention due to indifference in a unidimensional and a multidimensional policy setting using data from the US National Election Studies for 1972–2000 and find support for our predictions: voters perceiving a small difference between the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties are less likely to vote; and voters who perceive the two parties as more different on a larger number of issues are significantly more likely to vote.     

Voting power in municipal annexation elections

In many American states, municipal annexation and consolidation require concurrent majority votes of all affected jurisdictions. The effectiveness and fairness of this voting procedure have been criticized on the grounds that a small minority of voters can frustrate the preferences of the overall majority. This paper investigates the extent to which the relative ability of voters in large and small jurisdictions to influence voting outcomes in procedures requiring concurrent majorities is influenced by jurisdictional size. The Banzhaf index, which counts the number of case4s in which a given voter could reverse the overall group decision by changing positions on an issue, is applied to this problem of concurrent voting majorities. Mathematical analysis indicates that the ratio of power between voters in small and large jurisdictions approximately equals the inverse of the square root of the ratio of their population size.     

Long‐range dependence in Spanish political opinion poll series

This paper investigates the time series properties of partisanship for five political parties in Spain. It is found that pure fractional processes with a degree of integration, d, between 0.6 and 0.8 fit the time‐series behaviour of aggregate opinion polls for mainstream parties quite well, whereas values of d in the range of 0.3 to 0.6 are obtained for opinion polls related to smaller regional parties. Those results are in agreement with theories of political allegiance based on aggregation of heterogeneous voters with different degrees of commitment and pragmatism. Further, those models are found to be useful in forecasting the results of the last general elections in Spain. As a further contribution, new econometric techniques for estimation and testing of ARFIMA model are used to provide the previous evidence. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From 2000 Bush–Gore to 2006 Italian elections: voting at fifty-fifty and the contrarian effect

A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush–Gore 2000 American presidential election, followed by the 2002 Stoiber–Schröder, then the 2005 Schröder–Merkel German elections, and finally the 2006 Prodi-Berlusconi Italian elections. In each case, the country was facing drastic choices, the running competing parties were advocating very different programs and millions of voters were involved. Moreover, polls were given a substantial margin for the predicted winner. While all these events were perceived as accidental and isolated, our model suggests that indeed they are deterministic and obey to one single universal phenomena associated to the effect of contrarian behavior on the dynamics of opinion forming. The not hung Bush–Kerry 2004 presidential election is shown to belong to the same universal frame. To conclude, the existence of contrarians hints at the repetition of hung elections in the near future.     

Non-anonymous ballot aggregation: An axiomatic generalization of Approval Voting

We study axiomatically situations in which the society agrees to treat voters with different characteristics distinctly. In this setting, we propose a set of intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Type-weighted Approval Voting. According to this family, each voter has a strictly positive and finite weight (the weight is necessarily the same for all voters with the same characteristics) and the alternative with the highest number of weighted votes is elected. The implemented voting procedure reduces to Approval Voting in case all voters are identical or the procedure assigns the same weight to all types. Using this idea, we also obtain a new characterization of Approval Voting.     

An indifference trap of voting

In this paper strategic situations of voting and abstentions are analysed in a three-candidate voting model where voters are indifferent to various alternatives and candidates are interested in winning the election and seeing their most preferred alternative being realized. A specific decision problem is analysed, described by an Indifference Trap Game, with respect to, e.g., the corresponding Nash equilibria, perfect equilibria, and maximin solution. A second-best outcome is contained in the choice set of all three solutions while the Nash equilibrium concept is compatible with the Pareto efficient outcomes of the game.An alternative scenario where candidates suffer from incumbency but voters still are indifferent to some alternatives also supports the second-best outcome. Again, various solutions concepts are applied. We conclude that indifferent voters imply an eminent coordination problem for the candidates in the given voting game which, in general, ends up in inefficient outcomes. The inherent complexity of the decision situation cannot be sufficiently reduced to single out one and only one outcome.     

Targeted campaign competition,loyal voters,and supermajorities

We consider campaign competition in which candidates compete for votes among a continuum of voters by engaging in persuasive efforts that are targetable. Each individual voter is persuaded by campaign effort and votes for the candidate who targets more persuasive effort to this voter. Each candidate chooses a level of total campaign effort and allocates his effort among the set of voters. We completely characterize equilibrium for the majoritarian objective game and compare that to the vote-share maximizing game. If the candidates are symmetric ex ante, both types of electoral competition dissipate the rents from office in expectation. However, the equilibria arising under the two electoral objectives qualitatively differ. In majoritarian elections, candidates randomize over their level of total campaign effort, which provides support for the puzzling phenomenon of the emergence of supermajorities in majoritarian systems. Vote-share maximization leads to an equilibrium in which both candidates make deterministic budget choices and reach a precise fifty–fifty split of vote shares. We also study how asymmetry between the candidates affects the equilibrium. If some share of the voters is loyal to one of the candidates, then both candidates expend the same expected efforts in equilibrium, but the advantaged candidate wins with higher probability for majoritarian voting or a higher share of voters for vote-share maximization.     

Voter decisions on eminent domain and police power reforms

One unresolved issue arising from the use of eminent domain power involves how the perceived benefits and costs of eminent domain power affect people’s positions on the reform of eminent domain and police power law. The paper addresses this issue by estimating a voting model that explains voters’ decisions on eminent domain and police power reform referenda in the US. Estimates indicate that eminent domain referendum outcomes hinged on voters’ fundamental values and ideology, and voters’ immediate self-interest. Voters’ fundamental values and ideology affects referendum outcomes insofar as educational attainment in a county has a statistically significant effect on support for reform. Despite the greater incidence of eminent domain in low income and poorer communities, success of reform referenda in this study was found to be greater in counties with higher incomes and lower unemployment rates. This implies that whatever asymmetry exists in the exercise of eminent domain law across income groups does not affect voter reaction to eminent domain reforms. Moreover, counties with high unemployment rates consider the larger potential benefits from urban renewal projects in vote decision-making providing a link between self-interest and voting behavior.     

The behaviour of betting and currency markets on the night of the EU referendum

We study the behaviours of the Betfair betting market and the sterling/dollar exchange rate (futures price) during 24 June 2016, the night of the EU referendum. We investigate how the two markets responded to the announcement of the voting results by employing a Bayesian updating methodology to update prior opinion about the likelihood of the final outcome of the vote. We then relate the voting model to the real-time evolution of the market-determined prices as the results were announced. We find that, although both markets appear to be inefficient in absorbing the new information contained in the vote outcomes, the betting market seems less inefficient than the FX market. The different rates of convergence to the fundamental value between the two markets lead to highly profitable arbitrage opportunities.     

An economic offer they cannot refuse! Economic expectations on incumbent government support in Core and periphery European countries

The importance of economic conditions on election outcomes is well established. This paper supplements the standard approach to economic voting by assessing government support from a highly debated perspective of European spaces: Core countries and Periphery countries (Central Eastern European and Southern countries). The paper reveals that the economic conditions perceived by voters in the future are expected to differently affect incumbent government support depending on the macroeconomic position of the country. This paper finds that, contrary to Core countries' electors, voters in periphery countries are keener to support the incumbent governments if the economic outputs are positive. It concludes that positive economic expectations are strongly and positively associated with incumbent government support, regardless of previous vote choice, while negative economic expectations are strongly and negatively associated with government support.     

On the performance of voting systems in spatial voting simulations

We study the performance of voting systems in terms of minimizing the overall social disutility of making a collective choice in an univariate voting space with ideological voting and perfect information. In order to obtain a distribution of the performance indicator for each of the 12 systems chosen for this study—Baldwin’s Method, Black’s Method, The Borda Count, Bucklin’s Grand Junction System, Coombs’ Method, Dodgson’s System, Instant Run-Off Voting, Plurality, Simpson’s MinMax, Tideman’s Ranked Pairs, Schulze’s Beatpath Method, and Two-Round Majority—we simulate elections using an Agent-Based Computational approach under several different distributions for voters and candidates positioning, with up to 15 available candidates. At each iteration, voters generate complete and strict ordinal utility functions over the set of available candidates, based on which each voting system computes a winner. We define the performance of a system in terms of its capability of choosing among the available candidates the one that minimizes aggregate voter disutility. As expected, the results show an overall dominance of Condorcet completion methods over the traditional and more widely used voting systems, regardless of the distributions of voter and candidate positions.     

The choice of tax base by local authorities: voter preferences, special interest groups, and tax base diversification

We analyze local jurisdictions’ behaviors when selecting the type of tax levied in support of local services. Our analysis focuses on taxes that must be approved by voters. Taxes differ in their incidence; thus, even when proposed revenue amounts are held constant, voting patterns and the aggregate level of voter support differ among potential revenue sources. We use a general model of political cost minimization to derive three hypotheses about local tax authorities’ behaviors. Using Ohio school district data, we find that the expected probability of passage is a highly important determinant of tax choice. Further, there is evidence that special interest groups wield influence greater than their direct impact on voting behavior, and evidence that tax authorities attempt to diversify their tax structure.