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.     

Party loyalty as habit formation

In most democracies, at least two out of any three individuals vote for the same party in sequential elections. This paper presents a model in which vote‐persistence is partly due to the dependence of the utility on the previous voting decision. This dependence is termed ‘habit formation’. The model and its implications are supported by individual‐level panel data on the presidential elections in the USA in 1972 and 1976. For example, it is found that the voting probability is a function of the lagged choice variable, even when the endogeneity of the lagged variable is accounted for, and that the tendency to vote for different parties in sequential elections decreased with the age of the voter. Furthermore, using structural estimation the effect of habit is estimated, while allowing unobserved differences among respondents. The structural habit parameter implies that the effect of previous votes on the current decision is quite strong. The habit model fits the data better than the traditional ‘party identification’ model. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Union authorization card signatures and union certification election vote

One stage of the union organizing process involves the legal requirement that at least 30% of the employees in a potential bargaining unit express a desire for union representation by signing union authorization cards. Beyond the necessary legal requirement, do the data generated by card signing provide a potentially valuable source of information that may be useful to the union organizer in formulating campaign tactics? In addition, do authorization cards provide a sufficiently valid basis for establishing bargaining unit recognition as is the case in Canada? In order to explore these possibilities, the relationship between card signing behavior and certification vote in six union representation elections is examined. Although card signing and vote for certification are significantly related, overall results indicate that relying on union authorization card data as an indicator of vote at the individual level is questionable.     

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.     

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.     

Beyond the ecological fallacy

The analysis of long-term social and political developments in Western countries is often difficult because of a lack of sufficient survey data. Almost always official election and census statistics are available over long periods, yet the use of these data for individual-level inferences runs the risk of the ‘ecological fallacy’. In this paper we propose a method to go beyond the fallacy, the Duncan-Davis technique for area-classified data. The method is discussed and used to assess the amount of religious voting among Dutch Catholics in the 1971 general election. While the technique is only moderately helpful in this case, it is expected to be far more useful for the analysis of older elections.     

Biases and Strategic Behaviour in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA's best soccer player award

In this paper, we study biases in performance evaluation by analysing votes for the FIFA Ballon d'Or award for best soccer player, the most prestigious award in the sport. Our findings suggest that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent and own league team. Further, we show that the impact of such biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited and hence is likely to affect the outcome of this competition only on rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is small. Finally, analysing the incidence of ‘strategic voting’, we find jury members who vote for one leading candidate are more, rather than less, likely to also give points to his main competitor, as compared with neutral jury members. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of awards, elections and performance evaluation systems in general and for the FIFA Ballon d'Or award in particular.     

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.     

Embedded collectivism? Workplace representation in France and Germany

In most countries of Western Europe it makes little sense to speak of non‐union employee representation, as this is understood in the Anglo‐American world, for the principle of collective representation independent of the employer is strongly institutionalised. In this article we examine experience in two countries. In Germany, works councils with a wide repertoire of rights typically work in close partnership with trade unions. The system has experienced strains in recent years, and a growing proportion of mainly smaller workplaces are covered neither by councils nor by collective agreements; but there is virtually no evidence of alternative ‘voice’ mechanisms, and systems of direct participation are normally introduced by negotiation with councils. In France, works committees have fewer powers, and a divided trade union movement has been less successful than its German counterpart in ‘embedding’ the legally mandated institutions, at least in the private sector. Despite some common trends in both countries, national distinctiveness remains very apparent. There is growing scope for managerial strategic choice, but this is still institutionally bounded. Much more generally, countries displaying characteristics of a ‘European social model’ can be expected to sustain a close articulation between union and ‘non‐union’ channels of representation.     

21st‐century models of employee representation: structures,processes and outcomes

The 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey allows further exploration of the fate or workplace‐based forms of employee representation charted by earlier surveys. We describe the occurrence and diversity of representational forms, union, non‐union and ‘hybrid’, and the structural characteristics of workplaces where they are found. We go on to analyse a number of structural and processual differences and differences in outcomes. In particular, we try to estimate the effects of different forms for outcomes such as wage dispersion, procedural ‘fairness’ and productivity. The data show that ‘hybrid’ systems of union and non‐union representation are associated with the best outcomes, therefore, notwithstanding the continuing decline in the diffusion of the ‘traditional’ union‐based model of workplace representation, union presence is still a prerequisite for effective representation, while ‘pure’ non‐union forms serve neither employee nor employer interests.     

What is the role of perceived leadership capacity in presidential politics?

The relevance of leadership models in presidential leadership, and principally the role of perceived leadership in presidential election years, is an area of study with limited development but increasing importance. This study explores the relationship between young voters' leadership assessment of presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, and their reports of voting behavior during the 2008 presidential election. Leadership perceptions were collected from 812 respondents prior to the election. Results indicate that candidate leadership assessments have a significant effect on candidate preference after controlling for the impact of party identification and self‐perceived political efficacy. Further, political efficacy significantly impacted respondents' intent to vote in the election after controlling for these same variables. Party affiliation produced significant differences across the political ideology, leadership ratings, political efficacy, and likelihood of voting variables. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications as they pertain to political leadership.     

Election forecasts: Cracking the Danish case

Election forecasting models based on voting theories and estimated via regression analysis are routinely available for virtually all advanced industrial democracies. Denmark, however, offers an exception, for no such prediction equations have been published on the Danish case. This absence has sometimes been attributed to the puzzling nature of economic voting there, along with the complexity of its multi-party system, which renders formulation of the dependent variable problematic. We attempt to overcome these obstacles, offering a “synthetic” forecasting model for Danish national election outcomes, 1964–2015. The regression model, based on the variables of economic growth and vote intention, performs well, by various tests. Finally, we apply it, ex ante fashion, to the 2019 contest, where the prediction favored the Social Democratic led coalition, an outcome that came to pass.     

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.     

Assessing Contestability of Electoral Outcomes

This article applies Saaris geometric methodology to assess how muchdifference the choice of a particular positional voting procedure makeson the election outcomes. The British 2001 parliamentary elections are usedas an illustration of the methodology. The election results as well as MORIinterview data are used to make inferences regarding the possibility ofthe Borda effect. Saaris geometricrepresentation technique is resorted to in describing all possiblepositional voting outcomes in single-member constituencies where threecandidates are competing. Finally, two basic winning criteria are discussed.     

Diffusion and spatial equilibrium of a social norm: voting participation in the United States, 1920–2008

Social conformity can spread social norms and behaviors through a society. This research examines such a process geographically and over time for voting, which is strongly influenced by the norm that citizens should vote. A mathematical model for the spread of voting participation under the influence of social conformity is developed based on the diffusion equation, and predictions are tested with spatial analysis of state-level voter turnout in American presidential elections from 1920 to 2008. Results show that voter turnout has converged to a stable equilibrium in its geographical distribution across the states—but it is an equilibrium that results in persistent differences at the state level. Results are compared to individual-level and agent-based models. The model may be applied to other types of social diffusion that depend on specific geographical location.     

Binary choice under social interactions: an empirical study with and without subjective data on expectations

This paper examines two methods of modeling binary choice with social interactions: models assuming homogeneous rational expectations and models using subjective data on expectations. Exploiting a unique survey conducted during the 1996 US presidential election that was designed to study voting behavior under social context, we find that in various model specifications using subjective expectations consistently improves models' goodness‐of‐fit; and that subjective expectations are not rational as formulated by Brock and Durlauf. Specifically, members' characteristics are individually important in forming expectations. We also include correlated effect in the rational expectation model. This extension provides a remedy to the selection issues that often arise in social interaction models. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Some further aspects of ecological regression analysis

Ecological regression analysis is concerned with the inference of individual level relationships from aggregate level data. A first method for this type of inference, which here is compared to Leo Goodman's (1953) method, was presented by the German statistician F. Bernstein (1932). His hypothetical example, voting behaviour depending on age, is reanalysed, using historical data from the Reichstag elections, with special emphasis on the NSDAP vote. Furthermore it is demonstrated, why age is a bad predictor is ecological regression analysis, and how unreliable predictors can be diagnosed by means of several simple coefficients.     

Homeownership, dissatisfaction and voting

This article explores the relationships between homeownership, dissatisfaction with city services, and voting turnout in local elections, using original survey data. Homeowners are more likely than renters to vote, but the pure effect of ownership is not robust to either basic socio-economic controls or an instrumental variable strategy. However, dissatisfaction has a positive, significant and robust effect on likelihood of voting. When interacting homeownership and dissatisfaction, the author finds that dissatisfied homeowners are significantly more likely to vote than both satisfied homeowners and all renters. This finding is consistent with Fischel’s (2001) homevoter hypothesis.     

Dynamics in the fragmentation of political party systems

Fragmentation is an important dimension of political party systems. It concerns the proliferation of minor parties and the willingness of voters to vote for them. Past research relates party fragmentation to the voting system in a country; by Duverger's hypothesis, fragmentation should be highest in counties with proportional representation. The entropy measure is used to quantify fragmentation. The upper limit of fragmentation is analyzed in 24 countries, and the patterns of change in fragmentation are identified with mathematical difference equations, testing the idea that voters and parties evolve toward an equilibrium in fragmentation. The highest level of fragmentation is found comparable with a psychological limit on human information processing. In 17 of 22 countries, fragmentation moves toward an equilibrium, regardless of the type of voting system, and countries with higher equilibrium levels usually evolve more slowly. The results affirm the stability of democratic governments but raise questions about voters' strategies and suggest that some voters may try to control fragmentation when they vote.