The public may not be getting the policies they want, but it’s very hard to measure what they do want.

If democracy is to be representative, then public policies should reflect what the public wants. But how do we determine whether or not this is the case? Christopher Wlezien takes a close look at policy representation, arguing that it can be very hard to assess given that support for and opposition to a specific policy may not reflect what the public actually wants. Public preferences for “more” policy (spending for example) also may not tell us much about what the public wants. He warns that in some policy areas, expressed preferences for more spending are completely unrelated to the policy status quo and so tell us nothing about whether the public even wants more or less

Early campaign economic perceptions can help to predict the national verdict on Election Day

It is well known that elections are determined by certain fundamental variables: internal factors that reflect voters’ long-term political predispositions and external factors that are unique to each campaign. Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien examine how one external factor, the state of the economy, compares to how voters’ internal factors evolve over the final 200 days of presidential campaigns. They find that while noneconomic factors dominate at the outset of the campaign, the economic component increases in salience as Election Day draws nearer and offers greater electoral predictability overall

National polls and district information point to a 10 seat GOP midterm swing in the House to 244 seats

This midterm cycle, much commentary has been focused on Senate races, given that the Republican Party looks very likely to hold and increase its seats in the House of Representatives. But how many House seats should the GOP expect to win? With a week to go, Joseph Bafumi, Robert S. Erikson, and Christopher Wlezien give an updated House forecast. They write that a combination of the GOP’s incumbency advantage, their domination of state legislatures (and thus, redistricting) since 2010, and U.S. internal migration, mean that the Republican Party are likely to win about 244 seats on November 4th

Forecasting House Seats from General Congressional Polls

According to the frequent polling on the generic ballot for Congress, the Democrats hold a large advantage leading up to the vote on November 7. But does this Democratic edge mean that the Democrats will win a majority of House seats? Doubts are often expressed about the accuracy of the generic ballot polls. And even if the polls are correct in indicating a majority of votes going to Democratic candidates, further doubts are expressed about whether the Democrats' vote margin will be sufficient to win the most seats. This paper is intended to provide some guidance for translating the results of generic congressional polls into the election outcome

It's (Change in) the (Future) Economy, Stupid: Economic Indicators, the Media, and Public Opinion

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111207/1/ajps12145-sup-0001-text.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111207/2/ajps12145.pd

Social Welfare Policy Outputs and Governing Parties’ Left-Right Images: Do Voters Respond?

While previous research evaluates how citizens’ perceptions of governing parties’ ideologies respond to party policy rhetoric and the composition of governing coalitions, no extant study addresses whether citizens cue off of government policy outputs. We calibrate citizens’ Left-Right party placements against data on government welfare policies in analyses of 15 party systems for 1973–2010. We identify a welfare generosity effect where governing parties’ images shift further left when welfare policies are more generous; moreover, the public appears to hold the current government accountable for the welfare regime it inherited, in addition to the welfare policy changes to this regime it has enacted since the last election. However, we find no evidence that citizens react to governments’ manifesto-based policy rhetoric, which suggests that citizens prioritize actual government policies, not words. These findings have implications for parties’ election strategies and for mass-elite linkages

An analysis of the public’s personal, national and EU issue priorities

Scholars characterize decision-making in the European Union (EU) as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this paper, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Specifically, we use data from the Eurobarometer to evaluate the degree of correspondence between issues that citizens consider important to them personally, to their country and to the EU. We find generally weak relationships between different levels of governance, which suggests national issue priorities are distinct from both personal and EU priorities. The results indicate that more careful research is needed to understand how public priorities at different levels affect politics and policy in the E

Political parties and the timeline of elections

Scholars are beginning to understand the evolution of electoral sentiment across countries. Recent research shows that early vote intention polls – from years before Election Day – contain substantial information about the final result but that they become increasingly informative over the election cycle. The degree to which this is true varies across countries in important and understandable ways given differences in political institutions, but the pattern is strikingly general. What we do not know is whether and how the characteristics of political parties matter. Do preferences evolve differently for niche and catch-all parties? For government and opposition parties? For new and old parties? This paper addresses these issues. We consider differences in political parties and how they might impact voter preferences over the course of the election cycle. We then outline an empirical analysis relating support for parties in pre-election polls to their final vote in legislative elections. The analysis relies on 23,000 vote intention polls in 31 countries since 1942, covering 212 discrete electoral cycles and encompassing 236 political parties. Our results indicate that party characteristics are important to the structure and evolution of preferences, and that the size and age of parties matter most of all. Preferences for smaller and older parties crystallize early and remain strikingly stable over the course of the election cycle by comparison with larger and newer parties. Though the patterns are as we expected, the details are somewhat surprising, as we will se