Forecasting Elections from Voters’ Perceptions of Candidates’ Ability to Handle Issues

Andreas Graefe () and J. Scott Armstrong ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Ideally, presidential elections should be decided based on how the candidates would handle issues facing the country. If so, knowledge about the voters’ perception of the candidates should help to forecast election outcomes. Our model, named PollyIssues, provides a forecast of the winner of the popular vote in U.S. Presidential Elections. It is based on the voters’ overall perception of which candidate will do the best job in handling the issues facing the country. PollyIssues correctly picked the winner for nine of the last ten elections from 1972 to 2008, with one tie. In addition, it provided an idea of the margin of victory. In predicting the two-party vote percentages for the last three elections from 2000 to 2008, its out-of-sample forecasts outperformed those derived from well-established econometric models.

Keywords: forecasting methods; regression models; index method; experience tables; accuracy; in-sample; out-of-sample (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 C5 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-for and nep-pol
Date: 2008-08-04, Revised 2009-01-27
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/9829/ orginal version
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10133/ revised version
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13079/ revised version

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:9829

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Address: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ekkehart Schlicht ().