Universidade do Minho. Núcleo de Investigação em Políticas Económicas (NIPE)
Abstract
Electoral behaviour in recently established democracies has been more frequently treated from the point of view of its unpredictability, volatility and personalistic elements than that of its "fundamentals". In this paper, we wish to contribute to redress this imbalance by advancing a forecasting model for general elections in a young democracy, Portugal. Building on the very familiar notion that the vote for the incumbent can be predicted on the basis of "economics" and "politics", we capture "economics" through a nonlinear specification of economic growth. Furthermore, we include two structural features of Portuguese politics, which have entailed a systematic electoral punishment for the centre-left Socialist Party as the incumbent and for all incumbents involved in political conflicts with the elected president in Portugal's semi-presidentialism.NIPE – Núcleo de Investigação em Políticas Económicas – is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology through the Programa Operacional Ciência e Inovação 2010 (POCI 2010) of the III Quadro Comunitário de Apoio (QCA III), which is financed by FEDER and Portuguese funds
