While economic voting has been much studied, almost all the work has been based on the classic reward-punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue. The economic is, indeed, a valence issue, but it is much more than that. In the work at hand, we explore two other dimensions of...

The COVID-19 public health pandemic saw governments spend trillions of dollars to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus as well as to soften the economic blow from the shutting down of national economies. Subsequent budget shortfalls raise the question of how governments will pay for the direct...

The unequal burden from the COVID-19 crisis (e.g., in terms of infection and death rates) across Canadian provinces is important and puzzling. Some have speculated that differences in levels of citizen compliance with public health preventive measures are central to understanding...

The Jobs Model of presidential election forecasting predicted well in 2004. The model, based on data available in August 2004, generated an error of only 1.3 percentage points when forecasting the incumbent share of the two-party popular vote (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004). In contrast, the median...

The statistical modelers are back. The presidential election forecasting errors of 2000 did not repeat themselves in 2004. On the contrary, the forecasts, from at least seven different teams, were generally quite accurate (Campbell 2004; Lewis-Beck 2005). Encouragingly, their prowess is receiving...

The behavior of the individual Spanish voter has come to be rather well-understood, thanks to a growing research literature. However, no models have appeared to explain, or to forecast, national election outcomes. The presence of this research gap contrasts sharply with the extensive election...

We develop a simple structural forecasting model of govenment support in Swedish parliamentary elections, building on unemployment and inflation figures. The model predicts that the incumbent government will receive 49.7 percent of the vote in the september 2014 elections. In contrast, a simple...

In French national elections, the presence of a national economic vote is clear. However, the character of the economic vote is less clear at the regional level. Assuming regional elections are second order, voters may wish to signal the national incumbent, by rewarding or punishing it for...