Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Simple economic relationships -- Party identification : is it changeable? Is it explicable? -- Presidential elections : a more comprehensive view -- Congressional elections : yes, the Senate too -- Economics and politics : egocentric or sociotropic? -- Forecasting elections -- Concluding remarks

At its most basic level, this forecast of the 2012 presidential election performed successfully. The model forecasted the reelection of President Obama. With 53.8% of the two-party vote; he ended up with 51.8% (as of November 28, 2012), yielding an error of 2.0 percentage points. Prior to 2012 the average out-of-sample forecasting error was 3.34 points. Here, the model does better than the average of the previous years by almost a point. Running the model with the added data point does not change matters appreciably. The economic item increases slightly and the logged time in the White House item weakens slightly. The overall fit of the model is just a bit lower.

ObjectivesThe purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between religion and voting behavior and political attitudes. Moreover, this work examines the distinction between black and white evangelicals.MethodsThis article makes use of regression and logit analysis of the American National Election Studies of 1992 through 2008.ResultsIdentification with a particular tradition is important, along with attitudes concerning the authorship of the Bible. Moreover, affiliation with an evangelical tradition works in opposite directions for African Americans and whites. African‐American evangelicals, perhaps because of the messages on economics and civil rights that are preached in the traditional black church, are more likely than other African Americans to vote Democratic. Looking at differences concerning political issues, however, shows much less clarity than does voting behavior. The differences between African‐American and white evangelicals are largely nonexistent, except on issues that deal specifically with race.ConclusionThe relationship between religion and voting behavior in presidential elections is more complex than previously thought.

Do our models of political behavior bear any resemblance to reality? Forecasting
elections is one opportunity to assess whether our models of voting behavior are
accurate. Over the past few decades, political scientists have been willing to put
themselves out there to forecast elections. Explaining a past event allows us the
ability to retrofit our models before we make them available to the broader
community. In short, forecasting elections provides us the opportunity to develop
humility. The forecasting community has done a reasonable job over the past few
elections. Aside from 2000, forecasters have been largely accurate. Even in 2000,
the forecasting community can claim a modest victory. The community was right about
the popular vote winner; it just happened that the popular vote winner lost the
election that counts—the Electoral College.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium
of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer
leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the
accuracy of their models.At its most basic level, the Economic Expectations and
Time-for-a-Change Model performed well in that it successfully
forecast a Barack Obama victory. It was in estimating the two-party
vote that the model underperformed. The point estimate was off by
just under five percentage points. While not terrible, the model did
not perform as well as it did in earlier years.