Popular Vote Research Articles

Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836-2016.

Inversions-in which the popular vote winner loses the election-have occurred in four US presidential races. We show that rather than being statistical flukes, inversions have been ex ante likely since the early 1800s. In elections yielding a popular vote margin within 1 point (one-eighth of presidential elections), about 40 percent will be inversions in expectation. We show this conditional probability is remarkably stable across historical periods-despite differences in which groups voted, which states existed, and which parties participated. Our findings imply that the United States has experienced so few inversions merely because there have been so few elections (and fewer close elections).

Humpty Dumpty, Norm from Cheers and the Electoral College: Why State Legislatures Can Override the Popular Vote for President

Humpty Dumpty, Norm from Cheers and the Electoral College: Why State Legislatures Can Override the Popular Vote for President

Electoral College versus Popular Vote

Electoral College versus Popular Vote

Zagadnienie sądów pokoju w pracach Sejmu II Rzeczypospolitej w świetle wniosków i interpelacji poselskich

The Issue of the Office of Justice of the Peace in the Work of the Sejm of the Second Polish Republic in Light of Parliamentary Bills and Interpellations The justices of the peace were one of the forms of society’s participation in the judiciary in the Second Polish Republic. This institution was inherited from the former partitioning states and did not exist throughout the country. Justices of the peace were provided for by the Act’s provisions amending the Law on the System of Ordinary Courts, but its requirements have been never implemented. Justices of the peace ended their activity in 1929, but their formal liquidation only occurred in 1938. In interwar Poland justices of the peace were not a form of public participation in the judiciary. They were in fact judges with significantly lower substantive competencies than professional judges. Contrary to the provisions of the Constitution of 1921, justices of the peace were not elected by popular vote. The article deals with the extensive debates that took place in the Sejm regarding the selection of justices of the peace, and their role in the judiciary of the Second Republic of Poland, especially in its first period (1919–1928), when it was a problem of great interest to parliamentarians. This is evidenced by the numerous interpellations and parliamentary bills that the parliamentarians submitted, which the author analyses and quotes. On this basis, he concludes that the institution of justice of the peace was not supported by deputies, especially from among the agrarian and socialist parties. Often, justices of the peace were (in interpellations) accused of corruption, nepotism, and incompetence. The solution to this problem was seen in the full admission of society to participate in the judiciary, e.g. in the forms of justices of the peace, jury courts and lay judges.

CATHOLICS AND THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

This article examines the role of Catholics within the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Although Catholics were once a crucial and dependable component of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition, their vote in more recent years has been much more splintered. Nevertheless, Catholics have been deemed to be an important “swing vote” in American politics today, as in recent presidential elections they have aligned with the national popular vote. This article therefore focuses on the part that Catholics played within the 2020 presidential election process. It addresses the level of political change and continuity within the ranks of Catholics over the past several elections, how they voted in the Democratic primaries during the initial stages of the 2020 presidential election, their level of support for different candidates over the course of the campaign, how they ultimately came to cast their ballots in the 2020 election, and the extent to which their voting patterns in 2020 differed from that of 2016.

The Effect of Electoral Inversions on Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from the United States

AbstractWhen a party or candidate loses the popular vote but still wins the election, do voters view the winner as legitimate? This scenario, known as an electoral inversion, describes the winners of two of the last six presidential elections in the United States. We report results from two experiments testing the effect of inversions on democratic legitimacy in the US context. Our results indicate that inversions significantly decrease the perceived legitimacy of winning candidates. Strikingly, this effect does not vary with the margin by which the winner loses the popular vote, nor by whether the candidate benefiting from the inversion is a co-partisan. The effect is driven by Democrats, who punish inversions regardless of candidate partisanship; few effects are observed among Republicans. These results suggest that the experience of inversions increases sensitivity to such outcomes among supporters of the losing party.

Q&A with James Goldberg, Co-founder of Mormon Lit Blitz

The Mormon Lit Blitz contest has tapped into a rich reservoir of Mormon short-short fiction, reaching a milestone this year with the publication of its first anthology. With a 1000-word limit, final winners selected by a popular vote, and special rounds for translated and translingual work, the contest has yielded a panorama of diverse results during its first decade. Co-founder James Goldberg answers Dialogue's fiction editor Jennifer Quist's questions about this ongoing project to advance the reading and writing of Mormon literature.

Using Facebook data to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

We use 19 billion likes on the posts of top 2000 U.S. fan pages on Facebook from 2015 to 2016 to measure the dynamic ideological positions for politicians, news outlets, and users at the national and state levels. We then use these measures to derive support rates for 2016 presidential candidates in all 50 states, to predict the election, and to compare them with state-level polls and actual vote shares. We find that: (1) Assuming that users vote for candidates closer to their own ideological positions, support rates calculated using Facebook predict that Trump will win the electoral college vote while Clinton will win the popular vote. (2) State-level Facebook support rates track state-level polling averages and pass the cointegration test, showing two time series share similar trends. (3) Compared with actual vote shares, polls generally have smaller margin of errors, but polls also often overestimate Clinton’s support in right-leaning states. Overall, we provide a method to forecast elections at low cost, in real time, and based on passively revealed preference and little researcher discretion.

Does Direct Democracy Enhance Politicians’ Perceptions of Constituents’ Opinions? Evidence from Switzerland

AbstractElected members of parliament (MPs) are supposed to represent their constituents and, thus, to have an accurate perception of citizens’ policy preferences. It is often assumed that direct democracy instruments, such as the popular initiative and the referendum, have a positive impact on MPs’ perceptual accuracy. This study assesses whether direct democracy has the expected positive effect in Switzerland. It measures how accurately MPs perceive their constituents’ opinions on a variety of policy proposals through a parallel survey of 97 national MPs and 4677 citizens. Empirical evidence shows that MPs perceive policy proposals that have been subjected to a direct democracy vote more accurately. Furthermore, MPs have a higher perceptual accuracy if the policy proposal submitted to a popular vote was conflictual with a narrow ballot outcome. Direct democracy thus fosters political representation as popular votes constitute an important source of information and sustain MPs’ ability to accurately assess citizens’ preferences.

The Legacy of Rush Limbaugh Will Always Be Tied to Donald Trump

Abstract This article explores Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to tribalize American politics through his racially divisive, falsehood-ridden portrayal of President Obama. By playing and preying on white anxiety, the host laid the groundwork for the election of a president who essentially adopted his view of the Obama presidency. Limbaugh’s rhetoric about Obama serves as a case study whereby the most influential part of the conservative media during those years represents the whole. “How did we get here?” is the essential question right now in American politics. How did we go from a society that relatively easily elected Barack Obama twice to one that, popular vote loss aside, elected Donald Trump, and came within a small popular vote shift in three states from doing so again in 2020? Analyzing how Limbaugh ginned up white racial anxiety about a Black president helps us understand the rise of Trump, who began his White House campaign by serving as the nation’s birther-in-chief and who, in his reaction to the white nationalist terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, to name just one example, demonstrated his reliance on white identity politics. As Jamelle Bouie wrote: “You can draw a direct line to the rise of Trump from the racial hysteria of talk radio—where Rush Limbaugh, a Trump booster, warned that Obama would turn the world upside down.”

On popular votes and the problems of self-government: A systemic case for ordinary popular vote processes

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to demonstrate that bottom-up popular vote processes (the optional referendum and citizens’ initiative) focused on ordinary legislation can help to improve democratic self-government by uniquely facilitating the development and expression of various forms of political agency. Most significantly, it is argued that such popular vote processes can be designed in ways that endow them with significant deliberative credentials. Methodologically, the paper employs Mark E. Warren’s problem-based approach to democratic theory, which provides the conceptual tools necessary to advance a) a novel case for recovering popular vote processes as a valid institutional toolkit for exploration by democratic theory and b) an empirically informed set of best practices that can provide critical resources for normatively scrutinizing existing institutionalizations of bottom-up popular vote processes across the world.

Embrace the differences: Revisiting the PollyVote method of combining forecasts for U.S. presidential elections (2004 to 2020)

While combining forecasts is well-known to reduce error, the question of how to best combine forecasts remains. Prior research suggests that combining is most beneficial when relying on diverse forecasts that incorporate different information. Here, I provide evidence in support of this hypothesis by analyzing data from the PollyVote project, which has published combined forecasts of the popular vote in U.S. presidential elections since 2004. Prior to the 2020 election, the PollyVote revised its original method of combining forecasts by, first, restructuring individual forecasts based on their underlying information and, second, adding naïve forecasts as a new component method. On average across the last 100 days prior to the five elections from 2004 to 2020, the revised PollyVote reduced the error of the original specification by eight percent and, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.8 percentage points, was more accurate than any of its component forecasts. The results suggest that, when deciding about which forecasts to include in the combination, forecasters should be more concerned about the component forecasts’ diversity than their historical accuracy.

Mapping party support for EU referendums after Brexit: results from an expert survey

ABSTRACT The article maps party support for national EU-related referendums across the EU after Brexit. It is motivated by conflicting expectations about the trajectory of EU referendum politics in the post-Brexit environment which foreground either possible contagion or deterrent effects of the Brexit referendum. Against this background, the article explores the scope of party support for EU referendums in EU member states, which types of political parties endorse popular votes on European issues and how the Brexit experience has affected EU referendum support among European parties. To that purpose, the article presents novel data from an EU-wide (except Ireland) expert survey. The findings show that EU referendum support varies greatly between national party systems and that it comes mainly from Eurosceptic opposition parties, often on the populist far right. The impact of the Brexit precedent on party positions on EU referendums is relatively weak overall and uneven across parties.

Plebiscites in Europe after the First World War

The article discusses plebiscites held in years after the First World War, specifically in 1920 and 1921. They were conducted for the purpose of redrawing borders in areas where this was difficult due to their multinational structure, as well as economic, geographical, and historical factors. Thus, the great powers, who were on a winning side in the First World War, in some cases decided for an instrument of popular vote, which was not a novelty in history, but was then used for the first time to a greater extend. In the article, the authors present the similarities and differences between the discussed plebiscites.

Regional heterogeneity and U.S. presidential elections: Real-time 2020 forecasts and evaluation

This paper exploits cross-sectional variation at the level of U.S. counties to generate real-time forecasts for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The forecasting models are trained on data covering the period 2000–2016, using high-dimensional variable selection techniques. Our county-based approach contrasts the literature that focuses on national and state level data but uses longer time periods to train their models. The paper reports forecasts of popular and electoral college vote outcomes and provides a detailed ex-post evaluation of the forecasts released in real time before the election. It is shown that all of these forecasts outperform autoregressive benchmarks. A pooled national model using One-Covariate-at-a-time-Multiple-Testing (OCMT) variable selection significantly outperformed all models in forecasting the U.S. mainland national vote share and electoral college outcomes (forecasting 236 electoral votes for the Republican party compared to 232 realized). This paper also shows that key determinants of voting outcomes at the county level include incumbency effects, unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, house price changes, and international competitiveness. The results are also supportive of myopic voting: economic fluctuations realized a few months before the election tend to be more powerful predictors of voting outcomes than their long-horizon analogs.

The results of the referendum held on 28 October 1962 as reflected by “La Nation”

The article refers to the results of the constitutional referendum that was held in France on 28 October 1962 as reflected by “La Nation” newspaper. The October referendum was organized at the initiative of President Charles de Gaulle who proposed the direct popular vote in the presidential election. The majority of French people voted for the reform despite the active campaign against it organized by the opposition parties. But de Gaulle himself was not satisfied with the results of the referendum because he wanted to get more support from the people. This situation gave rise to the opposition to say that the president has lost the confidence of the French people. The Gaullist newspaper “La Nation” was the only nationwide print publication to claim the victory of the general de Gaulle’s project.

Voting: A machine learning approach

Voting rules can be assessed from quite different perspectives: the axiomatic, the pragmatic, in terms of computational or conceptual simplicity, susceptibility to manipulation, and many others aspects. In this paper, we take the machine learning perspective and ask how prominent voting rules compare in terms of their learnability by a neural network. To address this question, we train the neural network to choosing Condorcet, Borda, and plurality winners, respectively. Remarkably, our statistical results show that, when trained on a limited (but still reasonably large) sample, the neural network mimics most closely the Borda rule, no matter on which rule it was previously trained. The main overall conclusion is that the necessary training sample size for a neural network varies significantly with the voting rule, and we rank a number of popular voting rules in terms of the sample size required.

공원 이슈에 대한 주요 언론의 담론변화분석† - 1995년부터 2019년까지 신문 기사를 중심으로 -

Parks became essential to people after the introduction of modern parks in Korea. Following mayoral elections by popular vote, issues surrounding parks, such as the creation of parks, have arisen and have been publicized by the media, allowing for the formation of discourse. Accordingly, this study conducted a topic analysis by collecting news articles from major media outlets in Korea that addressed issues related to parks since 1995, after the introduction of mayoral elections by popular vote, and analyzed changes over time in the discourse on parks through semantic network analysis. As a result of a Latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling analysis, the following five topics were classified: urban park expansion (Topic 1), historical and cultural parks (Topic 2), use programs (Topic 3), zoo event (Topic 4), and conflicts in the park creation process (Topic 5). The park-related discourse addressed by the media is as follows. First, the creation process and conflicts regarding the quantitative expansion of parks are treated as the central discourse. Second, the names of parks appear as keywords every time a new park is created, and they are mentioned continuously from then on, thereby playing an important role in the formation of discourse. Third,

Seeking Evidence of The MAGA Cult and Trump Derangement Syndrome: An Examination of (A)symmetric Political Bias

Three studies sought to explore the existence of (a)symmetric bias regarding Donald Trump. In Study 1, participants read one of three statements expressing different degrees of favorability toward electing the President of the United States via a National Popular Vote attributed to Trump or an anonymous source. In Study 2, participants read one of two statements either favoring or disfavoring the name change of the Washington NFL franchise, and the statement was attributed to either Trump or an anonymous source. In Study 3, Trump and Biden voters were asked to rate their support or opposition to counting all the votes in battleground states when continued counting was expected to either help Trump or Biden. Results for all three studies supported the asymmetric bias hypothesis. Trump supporters consistently showed bias in favor of the interests and ostensible positions of Trump, whereas Trump’s detractors did not show an opposing bias.

Did Gary Johnson and Jill Stein Cost Hillary Clinton the Presidency? A Counterfactual Analysis of Minor Party Voting in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Abstract Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote for president in 2016, but lost to Donald Trump in the Electoral College. Trump’s margin of victory in several decisive battleground states was smaller than the combined vote for the two leading minor party candidates: Gary Johnson, of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. The perception that Johnson and Stein “stole” the 2016 presidential election from Clinton is widespread, and potentially consequential for future minor party candidacies, but it has not yet been rigorously tested. In this article, we extend the analysis of minor party voting in the 1992 election from Lacy, D., and B. C. Burden. 1999. “The Vote-Stealing and Turnout Effects of Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election.” American Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 233–55, by using data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to estimate a multinomial probit model of voting behavior—including outcomes for vote choice and abstention—and calculate the predicted probabilities that Johnson and Stein voters would have voted for another candidate or abstained from voting, had one or both of these candidates been excluded from the ballot. We then reallocate Johnson’s and Stein’s votes accordingly, to estimate Clinton’s and Trump’s counterfactual vote shares nationally and within key battleground states. Our analysis indicates that Johnson and Stein did not deprive Clinton of an Electoral College majority, nor Trump the legitimacy of winning the national popular vote. We estimate that most Johnson and Stein voters would have abstained from voting if denied the choice to vote for their preferred candidate, and that most of Johnson’s remaining voters would have supported Trump.