Suchergebnisse

The Incumbency and National Conditions (presidential approval and aggregated personal finances) Model predicted President Obama would garner 47.9% of the two-party vote, whereas he ended up with 51.8% (based on available information on December 3, 2012). The error in this forecast (3.9 points) is somewhat higher than the average out-of-sample error from 1952 to 2008 (2.4 points). Although the forecast was off the mark, the addition of the 2012 result to the data set does little to change the slope estimates, and the overall fit of the model is only slightly worse (table 1).

Although research at other levels of elected office has shown that incumbency has a
powerful, additive effect on votes (Hogan 2004; Jacobson 2009; Krebs 1998), these effects largely have been ignored
in presidential forecasting models (but see Abramowitz 2008). Instead, some scholars speculate about the conditional
effects of incumbency; specifically, the decreased applicability of the
retrospective model when the president is not on the ticket leaving the
somewhat-harder-to-blame-or-reward vice president to represent the administration.
The difficult-to-predict 2000 presidential election generated some discussion on
this point. Although I and others argued (Campbell 2001; Holbrook 2001;
Wlezien 2001) that part of the explanation
for the forecasting error in 2000 lies with Al Gore's failure to embrace the Bill
Clinton-Al Gore record and reinforce retrospective voting, others indicate that the
retrospective cue may generally be weaker when the president is not on the ticket
(Campbell 2001; Lewis-Beck and Tien 2001; Nadeau and Lewis-Beck 2001). Indeed, Campbell (2001; 2008) argues
in favor of only giving half weight to presidential performance variables when the
vice president, rather than president, is representing the incumbent administration.
The logic here is simple: absent the president on the ticket, it is more difficult
to frame the election as a referendum, leading voters to attach less weight to
incumbency-oriented considerations. This is not to say that factors such as
presidential approval and economic performance are unimportant when incumbents do
not run, only that these factors might matter less.

The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important individual-level work that followed soon thereafter (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Fiorina 1981), election scholars have devoted considerable attention to the influence of the economy on voting behavior and election outcomes. Although the findings are many and sometimes disparate, a few general conclusions have emerged: economic voting is incumbency oriented rather than policy oriented (Fiorina 1981; Kiewiet 1983); at the individual level, evaluations of the national economy are more closely tied to vote choice than are evaluations of personal finances (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989); and, with the exception of 2000, the incumbent party is habitually returned to office when economic times are good and tossed out when economic times are bad (Campbell and Garand 2000). In short, we know a lot about how the economy influences voters and elections, and it would seem that there are few issues left to resolve.

At the time of this writing (early August, 2008), the political landscape would appear to bode well for Barack Obama and spell almost certain disaster for John McCain. With presidential approval hovering in the high-20 and low-30% range for more than a year, and levels of economic satisfaction bottoming out, it "should" be a terrible year for the Republican Party in general and the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, in particular, at least if the retrospective model holds. One factor that could mitigate the impact of negative retrospections, however, is that George W. Bush himself is not on the ballot to absorb the full impact of the national angst; in fact, for the first time since 1952, neither the president nor vice president is on the ballot.

This article explores the impact of cognitive style, as measured by need to evaluate and need for cognition, on information acquisition during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Election Study I show that both constructs are related to measures of candidate information, i.e., correct ideological placement, correct policy placement, and number of candidate articulations; but that need to evaluate has a much stronger and more consistent effect than does need for cognition. The implications of these findings are discussed.