Suchergebnisse

One autumn out of four, election forecasting surpasses baseball as America's national pastime. Then, everyone wants to know who will win, and everyone has a guess. Now, with the ballots carefully counted, forecasters await their awards. Below, I evaluate the quality of a wide range of 1984 presidential and congressional forecasts. The evaluation proceeds from nonscientific to scientific approaches, although this distinction is sometimes blurred. To lower the level of suspense, I should say that some forecasts turned out to be quite good. By way of conclusion, I offer a set of rules for selecting a high-quality forecasting instrument.Lucky GuessesMany popular election forecasting rules take advantage of chance, which has been working in their favor. Perhaps the most famous is the World Series forecast, which says, "If the American League wins the World Series, then the Republican presidential candidate will win." This technique was accurate from 1952 to 1976, missed in 1980, but worked again in 1984 with the victory of the Detroit Tigers. A lesser known rule of this type, which is my personal favorite, is based on the Beaujolais wine harvest. Accordingly, "If the Beaujolais vintage looks bad, then the Republican will take the presidency." This has held post-1960, and continues to do so with the poor 1984 crop (yielding a wine too light, with little color). There are other such rules that relate more directly to the candidates themselves and, in that sense, have more verisimilitude.

Summary in English. Uses a French adaptation of the Lewis-Beck Rice election forecast model to predict results of the 1986 French parliamentary elections.

Aggregate time-series, not individual-level, analyses have been traditional in France. To explore the effect of individual economic conditions on French voting behavior, responses to 55 economic items in 11 national surveys conducted between 1970 & 1978 were analyzed. Economic conditions significantly affected party choice in French legislative elections, with adverse economic circumstances generally producing votes for the Left. This relationship appears stronger among French than US voters. 1 Table, 34 References. D. Dunseath.

Past research has concluded that French peasants differ politically from their counterparts in other nations, because they are highly participative and exhibit no pattern of class voting. This analysis, in contrast, demonstrated that the peasantry is less involved in electoral politics than any other occupational group in French society. Moreover, they are distinctly anti-Left in their political preferences, forming a 'supporting class of the bourgeoisie.' These rather traditional behaviours are regularly observed in surveys across the post-war period, persisting despite the substantial modernization of French agriculture.