Prevailing wisdom has it that campaigns don’t matter when it comes to forecasting U.S. presidential elections; the incorporation of direct campaign measures into statistical forecasting models does not appear to improve forecasting accuracy. Richard Nadeau and Michael Lewis-Beck now challenge...

Are federal incumbents punished for national and/or provincial economic performance, and are provincial incumbents held accountable for the state of the provincial and/or national economy? Using a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of electoral results and macroeconomic data for...

The Liberals almost lost their parliamentary majority in June 1997. This article argues that preceptions of the unemployment situation hurt the Liberals and cost them the support of almost three percentage points of votes. We examine the reasons why Canadians did not render a more positive...

The paper uses the 1997 Canadian Election Study (CES) to determine whether there were significant dynamics in the 1997 Canadian election and to provide an assessment of the two key events of the campaign: the televised leader debates and the "Quebec" Reform Party ad. The data indicate that both...

This article begins with a review of the now substantial literature on the thesis that politicians manipulate governmental outputs so as to favor their chances of reelection. It concludes that while this "electoral cycle" thesis was initially overstated by its proponents, it retains more...