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ObjectiveThis article investigates the impact of public reactions to the Covid‐19 panemic on voting for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 American presidential election.MethodsThe impact of the pandemic on voting is assessed by multivariate statistical analyses of representative national survey data gathered before and after the 2020 presidential election.ResultsAnalyses show that voters reacted very negatively to Trump's handling of the pandemic. Controlling for several other relevant factors, these reactions affected voting for Trump and exerted a significant impact on the election outcome.ConclusionBefore the onset of Covid‐19 Trump had a very narrow path to victory in 2020, and the pandemic did much to ensure his defeat.

During the 1970s, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States witnessed unprecedented inflation, unemployment, and sluggish growth. This book examines government changes in economic policymaking and the public's response to such changes, and sheds light on the political economy of three of the world's oldest democracies.

Ballot initiatives and referendums are increasingly popular methods for addressing important political issues. Studies of voting in these events has found that people rely on party leader and candidate image heuristics when deciding how to cast their ballots. Some analysts have argued that these effects are heterogeneous, being larger for people with lower levels of political knowledge. However, research in experimental economics and political psychology suggests that the impact of heuristics may be greater among more knowledgeable individuals. This paper investigates these rival hypotheses using survey data on voting in a ballot initiative to repeal California's climate change legislation. Analyses using methods appropriate for studying interaction effects in nonlinear multivariate models demonstrate that candidate heuristics are stronger among more knowledgeable people.

In an article published in this Journal, Nadeau, Martin and Blais argue that perceptions of the costs and benefits of alternative outcomes and general orientations to risk interact to affect voters' decisions in referendums on fundamental political questions such as Quebec sovereignty. We use Nadeau et al.'s data to demonstrate that their interaction-effects model is overly complex and suffers from serious multicollinearity difficulties. A simpler main-effects model has virtually identical explanatory power and removes anomalous findings. We also argue that their model is too simple because it omits variables such as party identification, feelings about party leaders and government performance evaluations that voters use as heuristic devices to help them make decisions when stakes are high and information about the costs and benefits of referendum outcomes is low. We analyse a dataset that includes these variables and demonstrate that they have strong effects in a model of referendum voting that controls for perceived costs and benefits of alternative referendum outcomes and several other variables. Additionally, differences in the magnitudes of the perceived costs and perceived benefits of alternative referendum outcomes are not statistically significant. This latter finding contradicts widely cited experimental results in behavioural economics and related 'asymmetry' hypotheses concerning the presumed status quo bias in major referendums.