Predictors Of Election Outcomes Research Articles

Do Quality Candidates and Incumbents Still Matter in the Partisan World? Comparing Trends and Relationship Between Candidate Differentials and Congressional Election Outcomes, 1900–2022

The increase in elite-level polarization and the changing partisan nature of elections to the U.S. House led scholars to posit that candidate characteristics are minor considerations in determining these election outcomes. However, it is not clear if these trends extend to the U.S. Senate or if candidate considerations have lost the relatively minor predictive power they exhibited during the 2010s, particularly as partisanship continued to rise as a predictor of election outcomes. Using historical data on elections to the U.S. House and Senate from 1900 to the recent 2022 midterm elections, we test whether the incumbency advantage and candidate quality differentials are still salient predictors of congressional elections. We find that the incumbency advantage largely disappeared as a salient component of election outcomes for both chambers as partisanship increasingly shapes these outcomes. By contrast, we find that candidate quality differentials, while waning, still can play a considerable role in shaping congressional election outcomes, particularly in the Senate. We conclude by showing that the declining emergence of quality candidates may have played a pivotal role during the 2022 election cycle by costing Republicans control of the U.S. Senate.

Speaking of character: Character strength references in movies and presidential nomination speeches

ABSTRACT One way in which language can be used for persuasive purposes is through references to personal character, or the lack thereof. A series of lexica reflecting 24 character strengths were developed and combined with existing lexica reflecting virtues and morality. Two studies were conducted to evaluate these lexica. The first compared words in presidential candidate nomination speeches from 1864 to 2016 to election outcomes. Results indicated that candidates’ use of terms related to hope was a better predictor of election outcomes than incumbency. In the second study, both the highest grossing and highest rated films of 2013–2016 included fewer words representing seven of the character variables than a normative database, while the highest grossing films contained more dialog referencing creativity and leadership. These results indicate that lexical analysis can provide a potentially useful tool for understanding the cultural use of positive character terms.

How Effective Is Social Capital in Spreading Political Ideas? Evidence from Facebook Likess in the 2015 Queensland and 2017 Western Australian State Elections

How effective are new forms of social capital, such as social media, in spreading political ideas? We use Facebook page ‘likes’ as a measure of social capital, and votes received as a measure of performance, to examine the effectiveness of social capital in disseminating political ideas. To do so, we use data from two state elections in Australia - the 2015 general election in Queensland and the 2017 general election in Western Australia. Our main results suggest that for every additional one percentage point district share of Facebook likes that a candidate has, they receive an additional 0.15 percentage point district vote share. This result is robust to alternative ways of measuring Facebook likes and votes received and a range of different specifications. Using social media data, we also correctly predict the outcome of 70.95 percent of the seats in both elections. We show that Facebook likes represent a better predictor of election outcomes than either ratings of candidates’ beauty or competency.

India 2014: Facebook ‘Like’ as a Predictor of Election Outcomes

Can the count of ‘likes’ recorded on the Facebook page of a party predict whether it will win the elections or not? To answer this question in the Indian setting in the context of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the political trend on Facebook was estimated using the numbers of ‘likes’ recorded on verified Facebook fan pages during the period of study—24 January to 12 May 2014. A strong positive correlation was found to exist between the number of ‘likes’ a party or its leader secured on their official Facebook fan page and their popular vote share. A single latent variable—presumably, the political preferences of the people—explained 91.37% of the total variance in those two variables. Furthermore, the time period during which the ‘likes’ were recorded was found to have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between the ‘likes’ and votes. It was found that the month preceding the voting period was the best to predict the vote share using ‘likes’—with 86.6% accuracy.

Uno studio sulle presidenziali americane: l'economia conta?

The economy matters. This is one of the dogmas taught us by those who have studied the history of the American presidential elections. But is this collective perception of the influence of economic data on individual electoral behaviour confirmed by statistical analysis of the history of presidential elections? This study shows that the most commonly used economic indicators are poor predictors of election outcomes, and also that variation in the approval rating of the incumbent president is a variable independent from the real economic data.

Markets as Predictors of Election Outcomes: Campaign Events and Judgement Bias in the 1993 UBC Election Stock Market

Economists believe that markets are efficient aggregators of information. The 1993 UBC Election Stock Market was designed to use this ability to predict the outcome of the 1993 Canadian federal election. The final market predictions of vote shares going to the various parties were very close to the actual results. The market also generated a large body of data on the standings of the parties at every point in time during the campaign. This paper makes use of some of these data to study two sets of questions about trader behaviour. First, according to the traders and the Market, what were the significant events of the 1993 election campaign? Second, did UBC-ESM traders exhibit judgement bias in their trading activity? That is, did they tend to hold shares in parties that they wanted to be successful?

Campaign activities and state election outcomes

This research first clusters campaign activities in state legislative elections into five empirically justified and conceptually meaningful clusters: direct attempts to persuade voters, obtaining the support of other elites, attempts to increase turnout, seeking endorsements from other political officials, and fund raising. Indices created from these clusters are then compared to the situational factors of incumbency and competition as predictors of election outcomes. Data are surveys of candidates for the Louisiana legislature in which they were asked about the conduct of their campaigns and their relative emphasis on various activities. Incumbency was by far the best predictor of what percentage of the vote a candidate obtained, and in open seat contests, expenditures and competition best predicted outcome. Overall, the campaign activities had very little relationship to outcome when controlling for situational factors. Variations occurred between the House and Senate races with implications for challengers' strategies and campaign financing.

Consensus, Dissensus, and Guttman Scales: The Namoluk Case

Separate Guttman scales are developed for each of 109 respondents to a political attitude questionnaire on Namoluk Atoll, Micronesia. These scales are compared to examine the amount of agreement or disagreement among informants concerning the rank order of "difficulty" of the eight political offices that comprise local government. A master scale that sorts individuals into groups on the basis of offices they "pass" is created and the scale types of particular individuals are correlated with personal attributes they possess. This scale is shown to be a reasonably accurate predictor of election outcomes and of the category of persons who will run for which offices on the atoll. Considerable attention is devoted to how one determines reliably whether his data meet the criteria for scalability, and methodological devices are suggested for use by future workers that will largely eliminate the frequent misuse of the Guttman scaling technique in anthropology.