Suchergebnisse

Despite their obvious importance in close elections, previous research into late-deciding voters has come to quite disparate conclusions regarding their traits, attitudes, and behavior. We seek to clear up this confusion through an analysis of late-deciding voters in U.S. Presidential elections from 1988 to 2004. Moving past cursory analyses that treat late deciders as a monolithic group, we divide late deciders by level of interest in the campaign. Low-interest late deciders have few demographic distinctions from other voters but are less connected to and active in politics. They tend to make vote choice decisions based on party identification and issue evaluations. High-interest late deciders look remarkably like those voters who decide earlier in the campaign: politically knowledgeable and attentive to the campaign. They make vote choice decisions based on party identification and evaluations of the economy. Our findings suggest that analyses that fail to account for the two different groups of late deciders risk mischaracterizing their attitudes and behavior.

A commonly held view is that presidential elections are largely personality contests, and that the candidate with the best‐liked personality wins. But is this really the case? Based on a careful analysis of national survey data from the last 11 presidential elections, this article concludes that such a view is unfounded. The most personally popular candidate does not always win in the U.S.—indeed, in recent elections, the most personally popular candidate has generally lost. Much more central to candidate evaluations, and to who emerges victorious, are perceptions of candidates' stands on the issues.

We examine the notion of a "bellwether" location in the electoral political context. Bellwethers are thought to have predictive power because they supposedly signal how the entire electorate will move on election day. We consider how the number of bellwether counties—defined in several ways—has fluctuated since the 1930s. We also explore the extent to which bellwethers successfully predict future elections. With the proliferation of geographic polarization, few counties can successively and successfully pick the winner of presidential elections. Other bellwether measures fare slightly better or worse, but as Tufte and Sun (1975) found nearly half a century ago, bellwethers today continue to be poor predictors of future performance.

National economic conditions regularly influence outcomes in US presidential elections. However, beyond this simple finding, much remains unclear. How large are national economic effects? Which macroeconomic indicators? Subjective or objective measures? Retrospective or prospective? What is the role of institutions? In our analysis of the American National Election Studies, 1956-1996, we employ a National Business Index (NBI), an aggregate measure that amalgamates individual voter perceptions of the collective economy. The assumption of strong retrospective economic voting is tested under different institutional hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, it is not found to be influenced by divided government, but it is heavily influenced by incumbency, meaning in practice whether a popularly elected president is running. Moreover, this incumbency variable highly conditions the time horizon of national economic voting. When a popularly elected president is not running, such voting is almost entirely prospective. These conditional effects go a long way toward explaining certain enduring controversies in the literature. 5 Tables, 44 References. Adapted from the source document.