By-Elections, Changing Fortunes, Uncertainty and the Mid-Term Blues

Simon Price and David Sanders

Public Choice, 1998, vol. 95, issue 1-2, 48 pages

Abstract: If voters care about the size of the government's majority, then by-election votes should exaggerate national swings. Moreover, if there is uncertainty about the outcome of the general election and if voters' preferences are skewed in such a way as to give more weight to the 'downside' outcome (least favorite party wins) than the 'upside' (favored party wins with a larger than preferred majority), then there will be a systematic tendency for governments to lose by-elections, regardless of any changes in national support. These predictions go beyond those generated by conventional explanations. The theory is successfully tested against data from 383 postwar elections. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: By-elections, changing fortunes, uncertainty and the mid-term blues (1998)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:95:y:1998:i:1-2:p:131-48

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().