Forecasting Spanish elections

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe behavior of the individual Spanish voter has come to be rather well-understood, thanks to a growing body of literature. However, no models have appeared to explain or forecast national election outcomes. This gap in the research contrasts sharply with the extensive election forecasting work done in other leading Western democracies. Here, we fill this gap. The model, developed from core political economy theory, is parsimonious but statistically robust. Further, it promises a considerable level of prediction accuracy for legislative and European election outcomes, six months before the contest actually occurs. After presenting the model and carrying out extensive regression diagnostics, we offer an ex ante forecast of the November 2011 legislative election, then discuss the model and the forecast in light of what the actual election result turned out to be.

Economic Policy Voting and Incumbency: Unemployment in Western Europe

“…A contemporary work, from Spain, suggests that increasing unemployment helps Socialists at the ballot box, even when they are incumbent (Magalhães et al 2012 H1: As the unemployment rate worsens, the left vote share increases.…”

“…In a Western European context, this argument underpins Rattinger's (1991) finding that the SPD generally benefits from rising unemployment; German voters tend to believe that this leftist party will be more likely to solve the problem. A contemporary work from Spain suggests that increasing unemployment helps Socialists at the ballot box, even when they are incumbent (Magalhães, Aguiar and Lewis-Beck 2012). In their investigation of Hungarian legislative elections, Stegmaier and Lewis-Beck (2009) also show that the Socialists, in office or not, always reap votes from rising unemployment.…”

“…As stated, Hypothesis 1 posits a general monotonic relationship between unemployment rate change and left vote. However some of the above empirical case studies imply that incumbency itself may condition the relationship (Arnesen 2012; Dassonneville and Hooghe 2012; Magalhães, Aguiar and Lewis-Beck 2012; Pacek and Radcliff 1999). In particular, it appears that when the Socialists are in office, they may benefit less electorally from worsening unemployment.…”

Forecasting Austrian national elections: The Grand Coalition model

“…This measure frequently fares well in forecast models. While Lewis-Beck and Tien (2005) , for example, use jobs in their (Jobs) model for the US, Arzheimer and Evans (2010) and Foucault and Nadeau (2012) draw upon unemployment as an economic indicator for forecasting French national elections, as do Magalhães, Aguiar-Conraria, and Lewis-Beck (2012) for Spanish elections. Second, we make a case on the voters’ individual evaluations.…”

Inferring the votes in a new political landscape. The case of the 2019 Spanish Presidential elections.

“…to predict sales intention in the real world (Volkova et al, 2015). Recently this type of analysis has jumped into the field of politics to try to predict the results of campaigns by monitoring the interaction between candidates and voters (Magalhães et al, 2012). Since more and more people are posting on the Internet, it generates the idea to researchers and journalists that a collective feeling is present in the social media, ready to be listened, captured and analyzed (Budiharto & Meiliana, 2018;Cury, 2019).…”