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Conventional wisdom argues that national economic perceptions generally have an important impact on the vote choice in democracies. Recently, a revisionist view has arisen, contending that this link, regularly observed in election surveys, is mostly spurious. According to the argument, partisanship distorts economic perception, thereby substantially exaggerating the real vote connection. These causality issues have not been much investigated empirically, despite their critical importance. Utilizing primarily American, and secondarily British and Canadian, election panel surveys, we confront directly questions of the time dynamic and independent variable exogeneity. We find, after all, economics clearly matters for the vote. Indeed, once these causality concerns are properly taken into account, the impact of economic perceptions emerges as larger than previously thought. As well, the actual impact of partisanship is clearly reduced.

Nannestad and Paldam (Public Choice 79:213–245, 1994) published herein an extremely influential review of the literature linking economics and elections, what they called the \"VP functions.\" In that work, they offered a number of conclusions, in proposition form, about the state of the evidence in this field. We present the key ones (16 in all), and assess the extent to which they continue to hold, in light of the new evidence about what has come to be known as economic voting. As shall be shown, Nannestad and Paldam were prescient in their early establishment of many of the principal results explaining how the economy moves the vote choice.

Election prediction flourishes among pollsters, the media, academics, and political anoraks, with four significant prognostic paradigms: opinion polls, markets, structural models, and hybrid approaches. Structural models, inspired by political science theory and based on so-called “fundamental” indicators, have a long pedigree in predicting government performance in elections cross-nationally. Despite their prevalence and prowess in forecasting contests for government, these structural models have not been applied to predict referendums, where the prognosis game, as far as it exists, primarily relies on polls. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that plebiscites can be especially hard to forecast given that citizens often vote on complex subjects not always salient in public discourse, partisan cues are sometimes lacking, and late opinion shifts are arguably more common than in elections. In this contribution, we break new ground by fusing two strands of political science literature—election forecasting and referendums—and devise a prediction model of plebiscites based on economic, institutional, and historical variables, thereby providing the first structural forecasting model to account for referendum adoption and support levels. We apply this model ex-post to 42 national referendums in Ireland between 1968 and 2024 to test its applicability ex-ante. In Europe, Ireland stands third only to Switzerland and Italy as polities that regularly employ referendums to decide public policy issues. With reasonable lead time, ex-post estimates of our model offer solid predictions of the referendums’ outcome, with out-of-sample estimates calling the outcome correctly 68%–79% of the time, a remarkable feat given that the issues up for decision are varied. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model’s predictions are competitive with opinion poll estimates of these contests, illustrating that while our model is not a panacea, it provides a reasonable starting point for predicting the outcomes of referendums in Ireland and, importantly, plants a vital seed for future work on forecasting plebiscites using model approaches.

The impact of institutions on the economic vote stands as a well-established proposition for the advanced democracies of Europe. We know less, however, regarding the institutional effects on the economic vote in the developing democracies of Latin America. Carrying out an analysis of presidential elections in 18 Latin American countries, we offer evidence that the usual Eurocentric conceptualization of the clarity of responsibility is not ideal for understanding the economic vote in this region. There does exist a powerful effect of institutions on the economic vote within Latin American democracies, but one uniquely associated with its presidential regimes and dynamic party systems. Rules for these elections—such as concurrence, term limits, and second-round voting—suggest that we should reconceptualize the notion of the clarity of responsibility in Latin America, focusing more on individuals in power and their constraints, and less on the political parties from which they hail.

In comparative politics, an established finding—that economic development fosters democratic performance—has recently come under challenge. We counter this challenge with a dynamic pooled time series analysis of a major, but neglected data set from 131 nations. The final generalized least squares-autoregressive moving averages estimates (N = 2,096) appear robust and indicate strong economic development effects, dependent in part on the nation's position in the world system. For the first time, rather hard evidence is offered on the causal relationship between economics and democracy. According to Granger tests, economic development “causes” democracy, but democracy does not “cause” economic development. Overall, the various tests would seem to advance sharply the modeling of democratic performance.

In recent US presidential elections, there has been considerable focus on how well public opinion can forecast the outcome, and 2016 proved no exception. Pollsters and poll aggregators regularly offered numbers on the horse-race, usually pointing to a Clinton victory, which failed to occur. We argue that these polling assessments of support were misleading for at least two reasons. First, Trump voters were sorely underestimated, especially at the state level of polling. Second, and more broadly, we suggest that excessive reliance on non-probability sampling was at work. Here we present evidence to support our contention, ending with a plea for consideration of other methods of election forecasting that are not based on vote intention polls.

After decennia of research on economic voting, it is now established that the state of the economy affects voting behaviour. Nevertheless, this conclusion is the result of a focus on predominantly national-level economies and national-level elections. In this paper, we show that at a local level as well, mechanisms of accountability linked to the economy are at work. The local economic context affected voting behaviour in the 2012 Belgian municipal elections, with a stronger increase of unemployment rates in their municipality significantly decreasing the probability that voters choose an incumbent party. Additionally, we observe that voters are not opportunistically voting for incumbents who lower tax rates. Instead, voters seem to be holding local incumbents accountable for local economic conditions. We hence conclude that voters care about economic outcomes, not about what specific policies are implemented to reach these outcomes.

Evans and Andersen make the provocative argument that the effects of economic perceptions on political support are greatly exaggerated, owing to the endogeneity of economic perceptions with respect to partisanship. I question their claim, for several reasons. First, the dependent variable measure of popularity is unusual. Second, the causal modeling is based on debatable assumptions that could be behind these surprising results. Third, in the United Kingdom and the United States, evidence suggests that national economic perceptions reflect closely the real economy. There may well be an endogeneity problem in economic voting studies, but it more likely runs from economic perceptions to partisanship, rather than vice versa. Panel studies, available for both the United Kingdom and the United States in national election surveys, offer ideal databases for testing these rival claims in the future. Great care must be given to exogenize properly the partisanship variable.

Scientific work on national election forecasting has become most developed for the United States case, where three dominant approaches can be identified: Structuralists, Aggregators, and Synthesizers. For European cases, election forecasting models remain almost exclusively Structuralist. Here we join together structural modeling and aggregate polling results, to form a hybrid, which we label a Synthetic Model. This model contains a political economy core, to which poll numbers are added (to tap omitted variables). We apply this model to a sample of three Western European countries: Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. This combinatory strategy appears to offer clear forecasting gains, in terms of lead and accuracy.

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? The authors address this question by comparing eight forecasting models for British general elections: one based on voters' expectations of who will win and seven based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including ‘uniform national swing model’ and ‘cube rule’ models). The data come from ComRes and Gallup polls as well as the Essex Continuous Monitoring Surveys, 1950–2017, yielding 449 months with both expectation and intention polls. The large sample size permits comparisons of the models' prediction accuracy not just in the months prior to the election, but in the years leading up to it. Vote expectation models outperform vote intention models in predicting both the winning party and parties' seat shares.