Economic voting in direct democracy: a case study of the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum

Referendums provide citizens with more control over policy. At the same time, they often entail choices over highly complex policies and are politicised along partisan lines, suggesting that partisan rather than policy considerations will guidevoters’ choices. I look to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, which was particularly complex and polarised, asan opportunity to test for mechanisms of government accountability in a referendum. Using a national survey of voters,I show that the more negative a respondent's evaluation of the state of the economy, the lower their likelihood to vote ‘yes’on the government’s reform proposal. This relationship is remarkably strong: an average respondent with a very positiveevaluation of the state of the economy has an 88% probability of supporting the government’s reform proposal comparedto only 12% for a respondent with a very negative evaluation. The fact that economic evaluations are a strong determinantof vote choice provides evidence for the existence of an economic vote in a referendum. This further suggests that votersmay treat referendums as a sort of second-order election

Vintage errors: do real-time economic data improve election forecasts?

Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy

Voters seem to respond to the the ‘reported’ rather than the ‘real’ economy

The economy was one of the defining issues of the recent General Election, which research suggesting that Labour’s relative reputational weakness was a reason behind their defeat. Here, Mark Kayser and Arndt Leininger show that voters often respond to the ‘reported’ state of the economy, rather than the actual economy – with democratic implications

Do populist parties increase electoral participation?

While many observers view the rise of populism as a negative development for democracy, other authors have suggested populist parties might boost political participation by attracting disaffected citizens who do not normally vote. Drawing on a new study, Arndt Leininger and Maurits J. Meijers find evidence that in Central and Eastern Europe the presence of populist parties is associated with a rise in turnout. However, in Western Europe, there is no such effect, indicating that context matters for the impact populism has on democracy

How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums

Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switzerland between 1981 and 1999. Uniquely, these surveys also asked non-voters about their opinion on the referendum's subject. Comparing opinion majorities in the surveys against actual referendum outcomes we show that representativeness increases slightly in turnout as well as over time. However, we find only few cases where the outcome would have been more representative even under full turnout vis-a-vis a counterfactual representative outcome. Thus, our results are in line with research on the turnout effect in elections: Higher turnout would not radically change the outcome of votes. On balance we find more cases where referendums provided more representative outcomes than cases where the outcome was unrepresentative vis-a-vis representative democracy. Hence, we conclude that, overall, direct democracy seems to improve representation in Switzerland

A Länder-based Forecast of the 2017 German Bundestag Election

When elections are distant, polls are poor predictors. Too few voters are paying attention and too much can change before election day. Structural models can establish baseline expectations but suffer from high uncertainty and underspecification imposed by small samples. We present an early forecast of the 2017 Bundestag election results for individual parties that leverages economic and political data as well as state parliament (Landtag) election results in the German states (Länder) to sidestep these shortcomings. A linear random effectst model provides our estimates. Länder elections are dispersed over the calendar and offer the advantage of capturing both actual voter preferences and new political issues. We argue that this approach offers a promising method for early forecasts when polls are not informative

Electoral participation, political disaffection, and the rise of the populist radical right

Does the populist radical right benefit from increased electoral mobilization? Integrating theories of political grievances with accounts of party competition in Western Europe, we contend that the populist right gains advantage from increased electoral mobilization, but that this effect is conditional on political disaffection. We draw on a novel panel dataset (2009-2019) of more than 10,000 German municipalities and city districts to study the implications of turnout surges as a function of pre-existing levels of political disaffection in a difference-in-differences design. The results demonstrate that turnout surges benefit the populist right "Alternative fur Deutschland" (AfD) in contexts of widespread political distrust. In contrast, increased mobilization acts to depress its electoral fortunes in communities marked by low baseline levels of political disaffection. In shedding light on the interplay between political disaffection and electoral mobilization, this study has important implications for understanding the surge of the populist right in established democracies

A predictive test of voters' economic benchmarking: the 2013 German Bundestag election

Do voters judge their national economy relative to economic performance abroad? In 2013 we took advantage of the German Bundestag election to test this hypothesis predictively. Nearly two months prior to the election, we published an election forecast relying on a theory-driven empirical model of election outcomes that draws on previous election outcomes; characteristics of the government and of voters; and, most originally, the relative economic performance of Germany ('benchmarked' growth) in comparison to the three other most important economies in Europe - France, the UK and Italy. Our forecast put the outgoing coalition government of CDU/CSU and FDP at 47.05 per cent of the popular vote deviating from the actual outcome of 46.3 by 0.75 points. This makes our forecast one of the most accurate in this election cycle. Despite one-and-a-half months of lead time, our forecast performed on par or slightly better than the last poll results issued only two days before the election