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"Drawing on classic and contemporary scholarship and empirical analysis of elections and public expenditures in 80 countries, the author argues for the existence of primary and secondary laws of politics. Starting with how basic elements of politics-leadership, organization, ideology, resources, and force-coalesce in the formation of states, he proceeds to examine the operations of those laws in democracies and dictatorships. Primary laws constrain the support that incumbents draw from the electorate, limiting their time in office. They operate unimpeded in democracies. Secondary laws describe the general tendency of the state to expand vis-à-vis economy and society. They exert their greatest force in one-party states imbued with a totalitarian ideology. The author establishes the primary laws in a rigorous analysis of 1,100 parliamentary and presidential elections in 80 countries, plus another 1,000 U.S. gubernatorial elections. Evidence for the secondary laws is drawn from public expenditure data series, with findings presented in easily grasped tables and graphs. Having established these laws quantitatively, the author uses Cuba as a case study, adding qualitative analysis and a practical application to propose a constitutional framework for a future Cuban democracy. Written in an engaging, jargon-free style, this enlightening book will be of great interest to students and scholars in political science, especially those specializing in comparative politics, as well as opinion leaders and engaged citizens"--

ABSTRACTIn "In Laws of Politics and How to Establish Them," Erik Weber contends that my arguments for the existence of "five laws of politics" are "inconclusive." Although the "empirical evidence is impressive," he avers, the "underlying social mechanisms" responsible for the adduced relationships are missing. Without it, he adds, no empirical relationship rises to the special status of a "law" of politics. Helpfully, Weber did not stop there. Using the example of Duverger's laws, he suggested ways to close the "argumentative gap." In this article, I aim to do just that.

ABSTRACTIn this follow-up to "Five Laws of Politics," I show that the original estimates of electoral outcomes describing the five "laws" hold up with twice the number of elections and three times as many countries as in the original article. The analysis yields long-run equilibrium values for several electoral parameters that set limits to incumbent support in a democracy. The evidence lends additional support to the notion that elections in democracies appear as if governed by "laws of politics."

ABSTRACTDrawing on more than 500 elections from around the world, this article presents five empirical laws of politics. Four of these laws span democracies and dictatorships, and one sets a boundary between the two. In both regimes the governing party or coalition represents a minority of the electorate. In democracies this minority usually represents a plurality that amounts to about one third of the electorate. Judging by the outcome of the first free elections in regimes undergoing a transition, there is reason to believe that in dictatorships the minority is much smaller. Even as they have an advantage over the opposition, the incumbents experience an erosion of support over time. In democracies this leads to alternation in office, which in turn ensures that across many elections about two-thirds of the electorate gets to see its favorite party or coalition in government from time to time. In dictatorships, during long periods in office, support for the ruling party shrinks to insignificance. Also in democracies, it is rare for incumbents to receive more than 60 percent of the vote, and itneverhappens twice within the same spell in government. This appears to be a reliable indicator that differentiatesalldemocracies frommostdictatorships. The conclusion is inescapable—the dictatorial "passion for unanimity" and illusion of "organic unity" notwithstanding, the state is a plurality. The will of the electorate emerges as a result of competition among political parties.

The Fiscal Model of presidential elections not only failed to predict that President Obama would win reelection handily, but the error incurred in the forecast of the incumbent share of the two-party vote was such (46.9%vs. 51.8% or more) as to warrant a rating of "inaccurate" or "quite inaccurate" in Campbell's table of benchmarks for evaluating forecasts (Campbell 2012, 611). This recap is a preliminary assessment of what went wrong.

In March 2009, at a time when President Obama was basking in the glow of the
honeymoon with the public every new president enjoys, I asked, "Will Barack Obama be
a one-term president?" What prompted me to pose so impertinent a question at so
hopeful a time was that the Office of Management and Budget was projecting that that
year the federal government would spend 28% of gross domestic product (GDP). This
amounted to a 7% point increase compared to the previous year, the largest peacetime
one-year jump since 1930. The most recent estimate for 2012 is that federal outlays
will take up 24.3% of GDP, up 3.5% points since 2008. This is the second-largest
peacetime increase from one election year to the next since 1880, edged out only by
Franklin D. Roosevelt's first-term surge of 3.6% points.

A bare-bones, "economic performance" model of the number of seats won by the president's party in U.S. House of Representatives elections, estimated over the 1914–2008 period, yielded a point forecast of 227 seats for the Democrats, a net loss of 30 seats relative to what the party held at the start of the 111th Congress (if estimated with midterm elections only; 27 seats, if estimated with all elections). However, there was a great deal of uncertainty around that number, to the degree that there was "one chance in three or four that the Democrats [would] lose at least 40 seats," enough to deprive them of a majority (Cuzán 2010a). Moreover, "the historical distribution of incumbent midterm losses" since 1914 suggested "that the odds of such an outcome occurring [were] around two in five," so that "although the model forecasts lean against it, a change in party control cannot be dismissed tout court" (Cuzán 2010a, 640–41).

Historically, statistical models for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006). However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007). One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914 (only the second time that 435 representatives, the present number, were elected). The model was relatively simple, making use of national-level variables only (Cuzán and Bundrick 2006). Using a similar model, I generated a forecast for the 2010 midterm election.