The effect of radical right fringe parties on main parties in Central and Eastern Europe : Empirical evidence from manifesto data

Do radical right fringe parties affect main parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? Using data from the Manifesto Project, we analyze the relationship between radical right fringe parties’ and main parties’ policy programs regarding sociocultural issues in six post-communist countries of CEE. Even though radical right fringe parties have participated in government in several of these countries, and in Hungary a fringe party has become the country’s second largest party, our analysis shows that the sociocultural issues in radical right fringe party manifestos do not systematically relate to the changes in main party manifestos regarding those issues. Even if some of the main parties in our study might often agree with the radical right fringe parties, our analysis shows that the latter do not directly influence the policy priorities of the main parties

How Local Context Affects Populist Radical Right Support: A Cross-National Investigation Into Mediated and Moderated Relationships

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are often more successful in some regions of their countries than in others. However, previous research shows that the relationship between context and PRR support is not straightforward. We develop and test an expanded framework linking local conditions to PRR support through two causal mechanisms. First, we argue economic and cultural contextual factors can influence citizens by fostering a sense of perceived local decline, which in turn predicts both populist and nativist attitudes and, hence, PRR support (mediation). Second, we expect that citizens with fewer resources and stronger local embeddedness are more strongly influenced by the context in which they live (moderation). Combining geocoded survey data with contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, GB and NL), we show that the link between local context and PRR support is indeed mediated and moderated, providing a better understanding of the spatial distribution behind recent PRR success

Asking about social circles improves election predictions

Election outcomes can be difficult to predict. A recent example is the 2016 US presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton lost five states that had been predicted to go for her, and with them the White House. Most election polls ask people about their own voting intentions: whether they will vote and, if so, for which candidate. We show that, compared with own-intention questions, social-circle questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts improved predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections. Responses to social-circle questions predicted election outcomes on national, state and individual levels, helped to explain last-minute changes in people’s voting intentions and provided information about the dynamics of echo chambers among supporters of different candidates

Estimating polling accuracy in multi-party elections using surveybias

Any rigorous discussion of bias in opinion surveys requires a scalar measure of survey accuracy. Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy (2005, Public Opinion Quarterly 69: 342–369) propose such a measure A for the two-party case, and Arzheimer and Evans (2014, Political Analysis 22: 31–44) demonstrate how measures A′i, B, and Bw for the more common multiparty case can be derived. We describe the commands surveybias, surveybiasi, and surveybiasseries, which enable the fast computation of these binomial and multinomial measures of bias in opinion surveys. While the examples are based on pre-election surveys, the methodology applies to any multinomial variable whose true distribution in the population is known (for example, through census data)

Geolocation and voting : candidate-voter distance effects on party choice in the 2010 UK general election in England

The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote-likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants' support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual's support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters' choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage

Bread and butter à la française: Multiparty forecasts of the French legislative vote (1981–2007)

It is well known that citizens tend to blame the government for economic hardship, and that they see legislative elections as an opportunity to “throw the rascals out”. However, while this mechanism has been thoroughly explored as a basis for election forecasting in the US and many Western European countries, research carried out on the semi-presidential case of France has only developed more recently. We employ a constrained model predicting votes for principal party groupings, rather than relying upon simple incumbent/opposition vote prediction. Building upon work by Auberger and Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari, we adopt a time-series approach, using data from 1981 forwards to look for evidence of variation at the departmental level in support for party groups and economic indicators such as unemployment and GDP. We then assess the model’s efficacy in retrodicting first-round legislative election results in France