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Vote Share (vote + share)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	83%

Selected Abstracts

The Electoral Costs of Party Loyalty in Congress

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2010
Jamie L. Carson
To what extent is party loyalty a liability for incumbent legislators? Past research on legislative voting and elections suggests that voters punish members who are ideologically "out of step" with their districts. In seeking to move beyond the emphasis in the literature on the effects of ideological extremity on legislative vote share, we examine how partisan loyalty can adversely affect legislators' electoral fortunes. Specifically, we estimate the effects of each legislator's party unity,the tendency of a member to vote with his or her party on salient issues that divide the two major parties,on vote margin when running for reelection. Our results suggest that party loyalty on divisive votes can indeed be a liability for incumbent House members. In fact, we find that voters are not punishing elected representatives for being too ideological; they are punishing them for being too partisan. [source]

Presidential and Congressional Vote-Share Equations

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2009
Ray C. Fair
Three vote-share equations are estimated and analyzed in this article, one for presidential elections, one for on-term House elections, and one for midterm House elections. The sample period is 1916,2006. Considering the three equations together allows one to test whether the same economic variables affect each and to examine various serial correlation and coattail possibilities. The main conclusions are (1) there is strong evidence that the economy affects all three vote shares and in remarkably similar ways; (2) there is no evidence of any presidential coattail effects on the on-term House elections; (3) there is positive serial correlation in the House vote, which likely reflects a positive incumbency effect for elected representatives; and (4) the presidential vote share has a negative effect on the next midterm House vote share, which is likely explained by a balance argument. [source]

It's the Economy Stupid: Macroeconomics and Federal Elections in Australia

THE ECONOMIC RECORD, Issue 235 2000
LISA CAMERON
In this paper we examine the impact of macroeconomic conditions on Federal electoral performance in 20th-century Australia. We find that the electorate penalizes a government for high inflation and high unemployment relative to trend. Real GDP growth and real wage growth were not found to have a systematic relationship with incumbent vote share at the Federal level. We also examine the voteshare of the Federal incumbent in three electorates: the safe Liberal seat of Kooyong, the safe Labor seat of Melbourne Pans, and the swinging seat of Latrobe. We find some evidence that unemployment affects electoral outcomes in the swinging seat, but no macroeconomic variables affect outcomes in the safe seats. [source]

Popularity Function Forecasts for the 2005 UK General Election

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2005
David Sanders
The article provides a set of contingent forecasts for the forthcoming UK general election. The forecasts are based on popularity function derived from monthly time series data covering the period 1997,2004. On most likely assumptions, the forecasts produce a clear Labour victory in the early summer of 2005, with the Liberal Democrats increasing their vote share by roughly four percentage points. [source]

Memoirs of an indifferent trader: Estimating forecast distributions from prediction markets

QUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2010
Joyce E. Berg
C11; C93; D8; G1 Prediction markets for future events are increasingly common and they often trade several contracts for the same event. This paper considers the distribution of a normative risk-neutral trader who, given any portfolio of contracts traded on the event, would choose not to reallocate that portfolio of contracts even if transactions costs were zero. Because common parametric distributions can conflict with observed prediction market prices, the distribution is given a nonparametric representation together with a prior distribution favoring smooth and concentrated distributions. Posterior modal distributions are found for popular vote shares of the U.S. presidential candidates in the 100 days leading up to the elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004, using bid and ask prices on multiple contracts from the Iowa Electronic Markets. On some days, the distributions are multimodal or substantially asymmetric. The derived distributions are more concentrated than the historical distribution of popular vote shares in presidential elections, but do not tend to become more concentrated as time to elections diminishes. [source]