Suchergebnisse

A wide range of potentially useful data are available for election forecasting: the results of previous elections, a multitude of pre-election polls, and predictors such as measures of national and statewide economic performance. How accurate are different forecasts? We estimate predictive uncertainty via analysis of data collected from past elections (actual outcomes, pre-election polls, and model estimates). With these estimated uncertainties, we use Bayesian inference to integrate the various sources of data to form posterior distributions for the state and national two-party Democratic vote shares for the 2008 election. Our key idea is to separately forecast the national popular vote shares and the relative positions of the states. More generally, such an approach could be applied to study changes in public opinion and other phenomena with wide national swings and fairly stable spatial distributions relative to the national average.

Using multilevel modeling of state-level economic data and individual-level exit poll data from the 1994, 2000 and 2006 Mexican presidential elections, we find that income has a stronger effect in predicting the vote for the conservative party in poorer states than in richer states -- a pattern that has also been found in recent U.S. elections. In addition (and unlike in the U.S.), richer states on average tend to support the conservative party at higher rates than poorer states. Our findings raise questions regarding the role that income polarization and region play in vote choice. The electoral results since 1994 reveal that collapsing multiple states into large regions entails significant loss of information that otherwise may uncover sharper and quiet revealing differences in voting patterns between rich and poor states as well as rich and poor individuals within states.

Public opinion polarization is here conceived as a process of alignment along multiple lines of potential disagreement and measured as growing constraint in individuals' preferences. Using NES data from 1972 to 2004, the authors model trends in issue partisanship--the correlation of issue attitudes with party identification--and issue alignment--the correlation between pairs of issues--and find a substantive increase in issue partisanship, but little evidence of issue alignment. The findings suggest that opinion changes correspond more to a resorting of party labels among voters than to greater constraint on issue attitudes: since parties are more polarized, they are now better at sorting individuals along ideological lines. Levels of constraint vary across population subgroups: strong partisans and wealthier and politically sophisticated voters have grown more coherent in their beliefs. The authors discuss the consequences of partisan realignment and group sorting on the political process and potential deviations from the classic pluralistic account of American politics.