How Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election outcome was forecasted with geodemographics and public sentiment analytics

Career executives often occupy administrative positions that determine the pace and content of policy, such as those responsible for developing regulations. Yet, presidential administrations need control over these positions to achieve policy aims. This article considers the extent to which new presidential administrations marginalize career executives in key regulatory positions by transferring responsibilities to another individual and whether the mere expectation of political conflict with a new administration drives career regulators from their positions. Using unique new data on 866 career regulators that led major rulemaking efforts between 1995 and 2013, we demonstrate that turnover among career executives in key regulatory positions increases following a party change in the White House. Turnover also increases during a presidential election year, but this effect is conditioned by bureaucrats’ expectations of the election outcome. Finally, career executives are more likely to depart in response to favorable labor market conditions. Given our findings that turnover in regulatory responsibilities is driven both by presidential marginalization and strategic exit by bureaucrats, we conclude with implications for presidential efforts to control the administrative state.

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“It’s Largely a Rigged System”: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016

Political Research Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1065912918768006 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 71 (4) ◽

pp. 854-868 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Betsy Sinclair ◽

Steven S. Smith ◽

Patrick D. Tucker

Keyword(s):

Public Opinion ◽

Presidential Election ◽

Media Coverage ◽

Presidential Campaign ◽

Election Outcome ◽

Donald Trump ◽

Election Administration ◽

Mass Public ◽

Election System ◽

Competing Hypotheses

The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to counter Trump’s claims. Second, literature on voter confidence has established a “winner effect”—voters who cast ballots for winners are more likely than voters on the losing side to believe their vote was counted correctly. Thus, voters were exposed to two theoretically opposite effects. In this paper, we find that the “winner” effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. We also show the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue, find a symmetry of the election outcome effect for winners and losers, and reconsider our explanations of the winner effect. Finally, we go beyond the existing studies of the winner effect to consider the kind of citizens who are most susceptible to that effect.

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Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote

Political Science and Politics ◽

10.1017/s1049096514000341 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 47 (02) ◽

pp. 427-431 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Andreas Graefe ◽

J. Scott Armstrong ◽

Randall J. Jones ◽

Alfred G. Cuzán

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Presidential Election ◽

Election Outcome ◽

Prediction Markets ◽

Popular Vote ◽

Us Presidential Election ◽

Combined Forecasts

ABSTRACTWe review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts’ judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts fromFiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly large early in the campaign, when uncertainty about the election outcome is typically high. The results confirm prior research showing that combining is one of the most effective approaches to generating accurate forecasts.

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Them and us: Did Democrat inclusiveness and Republican solidarity lead to the 2016 US presidential election outcome?

Leadership ◽

10.1177/1742715018793733 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 14 (5) ◽

pp. 524-542 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Julie Christian ◽

Daniella Nayyar ◽

Ronald Riggio ◽

Dominic Abrams

Keyword(s):

Group Dynamics ◽

Political Party ◽

Presidential Election ◽

Social Values ◽

Election Outcome ◽

Self Similarity ◽

Negative Attitudes ◽

Group Members ◽

Us Presidential Election

This research examined the role that group dynamics played in the 2016 US presidential election. Just prior to the election, participants were assessed on perceived self-similarity to group members’ views, perception of own leader’s prototypicality, perceptions of social values, and strength of support (attitudes). Results indicated that Democrats were more inclusive, seeing more similarity between themselves and members from the outgroup political party, while Republicans displayed more ingroup solidarity and negative attitudes toward outgroup members. Trump was viewed as a more prototypical leader by Republicans than Clinton was by Democrats. These results may help to explain the perhaps surprising fragility of Democrat voters’ support for Clinton.

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“If he wins, I’m moving to Canada”: Ideological migration threats following the 2012 US Presidential election

10.31234/osf.io/5uaxg ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Matt Motyl

Keyword(s):

Presidential Election ◽

Sense Of Belonging ◽

Present Experiment ◽

Empirical Test ◽

Election Outcome ◽

The Us ◽

Us Presidential Election ◽

And Migration ◽

2012 Election ◽

The Relationship

Every four years, partisan Americans threaten to migrate to Canada (or some other country) if their preferred candidate loses the Presidential election. This phenomenon has yet to undergo an empirical test. In the present experiment, 308 Obama voters and 142 Romney voters following the 2012 election responded to one of two writing prompts that led them to think about how the US was becoming more liberal or conservative. Regardless of the writing prompt condition, Romney voters endorsed migration expressions more than Obama voters. Furthermore, Romney voters, compared to Obama voters, expressed a reduced sense of belonging in the US. The relationship between voting for Romney and migration expressions was fully mediated by sense of belonging. Together, these findings support the ideological migration hypothesis and suggest that threatening to move to Canada following an undesirable election outcome may be driven by voters’ belonging needs.

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One Hundred Years of Instability: Sex, Law, and Transgender Rights

Political Science and Politics ◽

10.1017/s1049096520000335 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 53 (3) ◽

pp. 494-497

Author(s):

Anne Caldwell

Keyword(s):

Presidential Election ◽

Political Order ◽

Election Outcome ◽

Nineteenth Amendment ◽

Opposing Party ◽

Physical Organization

Five years before the famous Seneca Falls Meeting in which a gathering of women demanded suffrage, Levi Suydam already had encountered the problem that sex posed for suffrage. Suydam, a 23-year-old man who supported the Whigs, petitioned to vote in 1843. The opposing party challenged his petition “on the grounds that ‘he was more a female than a male, and that, in his physical organization, he partook of both sexes’” (Reis 2009, 34). Because the Whigs won by one vote, Suydam’s status was central to the election outcome. After several medical exams in which different doctors reached different conclusions about Suydam’s true sex, Suydam was determined to be “more female than male” (Reis 2009, 35). Suydam’s case presents an important corollary to a more famous case of voting “fraud” after Susan B. Anthony voted in the 1872 presidential election. The 1873 trial and conviction of Anthony was straightforward: as a woman, she could not vote. Suydam posed a greater challenge to political order insofar as neither law nor medicine could pin down Suydam’s sex within a framework of binary sex. The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of the vote “on account of sex,” might have rendered the uncertainty of sex politically and legally moot. It did not.

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Leadership Experience in the Cold War

US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813169057.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 128-153

Author(s):

Sylvia Ellis

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

Cold War ◽

Presidential Election ◽

Election Outcome ◽

Policy Issues ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

Leadership Experience ◽

The Cold War

The 1960 presidential election was the first modern campaign and one that took place at the height of the Cold War. The closeness of the election outcome led scholars to ask what tipped the balance in John F. Kennedy’s favor. However, as Robert Divine pointed out some years ago, we can also ask why did he not win more convincingly given recent American defeats abroad? Although numerous foreign policy issues engaged the candidates during the 1960 campaign, this chapter focuses on the three major issues that came to life during the campaign—Cuba, the Soviets, and the tiny offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu—and to argue that Kennedy fumbled in his handling of all three but still managed to convince enough of the US electorate that he could be trusted to lead the nation on the world stage.

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