Quebec 2018, a failure of the polls or else?

The polls of the 2018 Quebec election forecast a close race between the two leading parties. The result, a clear victory of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) over the Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ), was clearly at odds with the polls. We argue that when the polls get it wrong, it is important to determine whether there was a polling miss, in which the discrepancy is due to changing voter behaviour, or a poll failure, in which the problem stems from polling methodology. Our post-election poll shows that changing voter behaviour—last-minute shifts and the vote of non-disclosers—explains most of the discrepancy. These movements varied by region. We conclude that the Quebec 2018 election was among the worst polling misses in history but not necessarily a major poll failure.Les sondages de l’élection Québécoise de 2018 avaient annoncé une lutte serrée entre les deux principaux partis. Le résultat, une victoire décisive de la Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) aux dépens du Parti Liberal du Québec (PLQ), n’était clairement pas ce qui avait été anticipé. Nous soutenons que, lorsque les sondages se trompent, il est important de déterminer si l’écart entre les estimations des sondages et le vote est dû à un changement dans le comportement des électeurs ou à un échec des sondages eux-mêmes attribuable à la méthodologie utilisée. Notre sondage post-électoral montre que des changements dans le comportement des électeurs—changements de préférences de dernière minute et vote des discrets—expliquent la majeure partie des écarts dans cette élection. Ces mouvements varient toutefois selon les régions. Nous concluons que l’élection québécoise de 2018 se situe historiquement parmi les pires écarts entre les sondages et le vote mais ne peut pas être considérée comme un échec majeur des sondages eux-mêmes

Decentralization And Electoral Swings

We explore how the uniformity of electoral swings in the district vote within countries is affected by the level of economic and political decentralization. We rely on district-level data from OECD countries in two consecutive elections before and after the Great Recession to show that as regional governments exert more influence over the central government, districts deviate less from the overall pattern of change in support of the national incumbent party. The causal mechanism accounting for the effect of decentralization on dynamic nationalization is examined with individual panel data from national elections in Canada and Spain

Is there a gender gap in the sense of duty to vote?

The topic of gender differences in the propensity to vote has been a central theme in political behavior studies for more than seventy years. When trying to explain why the turnout gender gap has shrunk over the last few decades, some scholars have claimed that this might be due to the fact that women are more dutiful than men; however, no study to date has systematically addressed gender differences regarding the sense of civic duty to vote. The present research focused on such differences and empirically tested the role of political interest and moral predispositions on this gender gap. We explored duty levels in nine different Western countries and, most of the time, we found small but significant gender differences in favor of men. Our estimations suggest that this relationship can be explained mainly by the simple fact that women are less interested in politics than men