Left-wing parties in Western Europe gain votes when unemployment rises, but only when they are in opposition.

How does a rise in unemployment affect support for left-wing parties? As Ruth Dassonneville and Michael S. Lewis-Beck write, left-wing parties might be expected to gain support during periods of rising unemployment as they effectively ‘own’ the issue in the eyes of the electorate. However, this effect may be complicated when left-wing parties are in government, as incumbent parties tend to be blamed for a struggling economy. Outlining the results of a study on West European elections, they find that left-wing parties do seem to benefit from a rise in unemployment, but this effect decreases significantly depending on the extent to which they are involved in government

Economic Policy Voting and Incumbency: Unemployment in Western Europe

The economic voting literature has been dominated by the incumbency-oriented hypothesis, where voters reward or punish government at the ballot box according to economic performance. The alternative, policy-oriented hypothesis, where voters favor parties closest to their issue position, has been neglected in this literature. We explore policy voting with respect to an archetypal economic policy issue – unemployment. Voters who favor lower unemployment should tend to vote for left parties, since they “own” the issue. Examining a large time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) pool of Western European nations, we find some evidence for economic policy voting. However, it exists in a form conditioned by incumbency. According to varied tests, left incumbents actually experience a net electoral cost, if the unemployment rate climbs under their regime. Incumbency, then, serves to break any natural economic policy advantage that might accrue to the left due to the unemployment issue

The economic voter and economic crisis

Theories of economic voting have a long tradition in political science and continue to inspire a large group of scholars. Classical economic voting theory assumes a reward-and-punishment mechanism (Key, 1966). This mechanism implies that incumbents are more likely to stay in power under a good economy, but are cast out under a bad economy (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000). The economy has repeatedly been shown to be a major determinant of electoral behavior (see especially the recent book by Duch and Stevenson, 2008), but the current economic crisis seems to provide a marked illustration of how the economy affects voting. In recent elections across the Western industrialized world, most ruling coalitions lost their majority. Opposition parties, on the other hand, whether right wing or left wing, have appeared to benefit from the economic downturn

In forecasting the 2016 election result, modelers had a good year. Pollsters did not.

For most commentators and pollsters, Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election came as a sharp surprise. Charles Tien and Michael S. Lewis-Beck examine how political science modelers performed in their election predictions compared to poll aggregators and to the national polls. When looking at Hillary Clinton’s share of the two-party vote, they find that political science models were the most accurate in their forecasts. The national polls, by contrast, were largely outside of the margin of error in their predictions for both Clinton and Donald Trump’s share of the popular vote

To improve their predictions, election forecasters should look to other disciplines like meteorology

The recent surge in public attention to election predictions has generated much discussion about how to improve forecasting model accuracy. Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier argue that advances in weather forecasting hold lessons for election forecasting. First, like weather models, election models should be based on sound theory. Second, more intensive data gathering, especially at the state level with repeated measurements over time, will capture the dynamics of the campaign and ultimately enhance the accuracy of predictions. Third, ensemble forecasting and applying expertise to adjust forecasts are other methods to consider for reducing forecast error

Macroeconomics, economic crisis and electoral outcomes: A national European pool

An abundance of comparative survey research argues the presence of economic voting as an individual force in European elections, thereby refuting a possible ecological fallacy. But the hypothesis of economic voting at the aggregate level, with macroeconomics influencing overall electoral outcomes, seems less sure. Indeed, there might be a micrological fallacy at work, with the supposed individual economic vote effect not adding up to a national electoral effect after all. Certainly that would account for the spotty evidence linking macroeconomics and national election outcomes. We examine the possibility of a micrological fallacy through rigorous analysis of a large time-series cross-sectional dataset of European nations. From these results, it becomes clear that the macroeconomy strongly moves national election outcomes, with hard times punishing governing parties, and good times rewarding them. Further, this economy-election connection appears asymmetric, altering under economic crisis. Indeed, we show that economic crisis, defined as negative growth, has much greater electoral effects than positive economic growth. Hard times clearly make governments more accountable to their electorates

Growth, Inequality, and Party Support: Valence and Positional Economic Voting

Economic growth helps governments get reelected. But does growth, as a valence issue, exhaust the possibilities for the economic vote? What about the impact of inequality, as as a positional economic issue? Can rising economic inequality make or break a government, independent of the country’s growth trajectory? We show, via an examination of 310 elections in established democracies, across time and space, that growth and inequality both matter for incumbent government support. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that both left-wing and right-wing incumbents are held accountable for changes in inequality. While these effects appear unaltered by structural factors such as federalism or the electoral system, their impact seems to depend, to some extent, on whether the country is going through economic hard times

Predicting bloc support in Irish general elections 1951–2020: A political history model

Election forecasting is a growing enterprise. Structural models relying on “fundamental” political and economic variables, principally to predict government performance, are popular in political science. Conventional wisdom though is these standard structural models fall short in predicting individual blocs’ performance and their applicability to multiparty systems is restricted. We challenge this by providing a structural forecast of bloc performance in Ireland, a case primarily overlooked in the election forecasting literature. Our model spurns the economic and performance variables conventionally associated with structural forecasting enterprises and instead concentrates on Ireland’s historical party and governance dynamics in the vein of testing whether these patterns alone offer solid predictions of election outcomes. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), our approach, comprising measures of incumbency, short-term party support, and political and economic shocks, offers reasonable predictions of the vote share performance of four blocs: Ireland's two major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Independents, and the Left bloc combined across 20 elections spanning 60 years

Washington DC may be politically polarized but most Americans are not

In recent decades the US Congress has become increasingly polarized, with legislators taking increasingly more extreme ideological positions on various issues. But does this polarization reflect the US as a whole? Using data from the American National Election Study Helmut Norpoth and Michael S. Lewis-Beck find that the American electorate is far from polarized, with a plurality identifying with the political middle ground and a very small number considering themselves to be either extremely conservative or liberal

Forecasting Spanish Elections

The behavior of the individual Spanish voter has come to be rather well-understood, thanks to a growing research literature. However, no models have appeared to explain, or to forecast, national election outcomes. The presence of this research gap contrasts sharply with the extensive election forecasting work done on other leading Western democracies. Here we fill this gap. The model, developed from core political economy theory, is parsimonious but statistically robust. Further, it promises considerable prediction accuracy of Spanish general election outcomes, six months before the contest actually occurs. After presenting the model, and carrying out extensive regression diagnostics, we offer an ex ante forecast of the 2012 general election.