Copyright (c) 2011 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck Recent documents in Michael S Lewis-Beck en-us Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:39:19 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/171 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/171 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:01:21 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Poetry http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/170 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/170 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:59:00 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Poetry http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/169 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/169 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:57:11 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Poetry http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/168 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/168 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:40:51 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/167 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/167 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:37:26 PDT Presidential election forecasting models may miss the mark, sometimes grossly, as the 1992 contest demonstrated. The reason for this, we argue, is specification error. The models include irrelevant variables and exclude relevant ones. In particular, prospective voting variables have been ignored. When prospective economic and political evaluations are added, alongside traditional retrospective evaluations, forecasting quality improves sharply. These full-time forecasting models that tap voter onentations toward the future, as well as toward the past, promise long-run accuracy gains. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/166 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/166 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:55:04 PDT During spring 2000, we released to the press a preliminary forecast of a Gore victory. Indeed, one of us, in a widely-read quotation, declared, "It's not even going to be close" (Washington Post, May 26, 2000, p. 1). We were wrong, as were all of our fellow modelers. Indeed, among "five of the best forecasters" identified by Robert Kaiser (Washington Post, May 26, 2000, p. 1), the Gore projection ranged from 53% to 60% of the two-party popular vote, pointing to a Democratic landslide. Such gross error raises the question: Should the models be junked? Some journalists, pundits, and scholars have suggested the answer is "yes." We disagree. Remember that forecasters of all stripes -- modelers, pollsters, marketers, campaign experts -- failed to call 2000. (See the review of 49 forecasts, from multiple and international sources, in Lafay and Lewis-Beck 2000). The virtually total inability to predict the Bush-Gore result also reminds us that no model will ever be perfect, that electoral behavior can never be fully determined. Still, while falling short of perfection, we believe that modeling can be improved. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/165 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/165 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:55:01 PDT In comparative politics, an established finding--that economic development fosters democratic performance--has recently come under challenge. We counter this challenge with a dynamic pooled time series analysis of a major, but neglected data set from 131 nations. The final generalized least squares-autoregressive moving averages estimates (N = 2,096) appear robust and indicate strong economic development effects, dependent in part on the nation's position in the world system. For the first time, rather hard evidence is offered on the causal relationship between economics and democracy. According to Granger tests, economic development "causes" democracy, but democracy does not "cause" economic development. Overall, the various tests would seem to advance sharply the modeling of democratic performance. Ross E. Burkhart Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/164 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/164 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:59 PDT Evans and Andersen make the provocative argument that the effects of economic perceptions on political support are greatly exaggerated, owing to the endogeneity of economic perceptions with respect to partisanship. I question their claim, for several reasons. First, the dependent variable measure of popularity is unusual. Second, the causal modeling is based on debatable assumptions that could be behind these surprising results. Third, in the United Kingdom and the United States, evidence suggests that national economic perceptions reflect closely the real economy. There may well be an endogeneity problem in economic voting studies, but it more likely runs from economic perceptions to partisanship, rather than vice versa. Panel studies, available for both the United Kingdom and the United States in national election surveys, offer ideal databases for testing these rival claims in the future. Great care must be given to exogenize properly the partisanship variable. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/163 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/163 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:57 PDT Political scientists usually view the New Deal as transforming the American state. A sizable literature in economics and history, however, has cast doubt on the significance of the changes wrought by the FDR administration. In this paper we propose a model of the state, and then test important hypotheses about it. More specifically, we focus on the New Era-New Deal period to test how, if at all, the American state changed during this critical time in its history. We systematically analyze five state functions: stabilization, redistribution, regulation, police power, and administration. Within each category, quantitative policy measures are evaluated. Although the FDR administration produced many notable changes in government policy and structure, our analysis suggests that the American state, measured in these several ways, was not transformed from the New Era to the New Deal. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/162 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/162 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:55 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/161 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/161 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:53 PDT In their pivotal 1986 volume, Converse and Pierce rekindle the debate over whether left-right ideological attachment or party identification serves as the psychological anchor of the French electorate. They argue that, much like Americans, French voters use partisanship to orient themselves to the political landscape. Our study, which employs the data used by Converse and Pierce, draws a different conclusion. We find that ideology, in terms of both scope and strength, clearly exceeds party in its importance for vote choice. Christopher J. Fleury Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/160 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/160 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:50 PDT Split-ticket voting has recently received special attention, because it provides a possible microlevel explanation for institutionally divided government. Are split-ticket voters intentional, selecting one party for president and another for Congress, in order to somehow check and balance government? A general model of split-ticket voting is specified, taking into account the important but neglected interaction effects of party, candidate quality, and incumbency. Then, cognitive Madisonian variables are incorporated and logistic regression models estimated on 1992 and 1996 national election data. Strong cognitive Madisonian effects are found. Model Madisonians, who seek to divide power and balance policy, make up over 20% of the electorate and may be largely responsible for the observed patterns of division at the aggregate level. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/159 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/159 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:48 PDT During the nineteenth century, a presidential voter actually selected a party-prepared candidate list, casting it in full view of others. The "Australian" ballot, adopted in nearly all states by 1900, took away party preparation of the ballot. State officials now prepared overall candidate lists from which the voter picked in secret. The introduction of the Australian ballot was heralded as a blow against political corruption and for "good government". But practical questions arose. With the state itself responsible for the ballot, how should it decide which candidates to list? Some barriers to entry seemed necessary, otherwise the list would be unwieldy. Each of the states began to pass laws restricting ballot access, often aimed at third parties. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/158 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/158 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:46 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/157 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/157 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:44 PDT In French election studies, a central debate concerns the French voter's "standing decision" -- is it party or ideology? The debate has been ongoing because of data and measurement issues and, we add, because of an inadequate understanding of the role electoral institutions play. The 1995 French National Election Study allows a fresh attack on these questions. It contains promising party and ideology measures, on a very large national sample. Both party identification and left-right ideological identification are shown to be widely held, with the latter more so. Their relative structural effects are found to depend heavily on the dynamics of the dual ballot. Party is more important for electoral choice on the first ballot, while ideology is more important on the second. This finding, demonstrated in fully specified logistic regression models of the presidential vote, seems also to inhere in the logic of French electoral institutions. The two-ballot rules, coupled with the pervasiveness of ideological and party identification in the public mind, go far towards revealing and explaining an underlying stability of the French political system. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/156 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/156 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:41 PDT The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models. In summer 2008, our Jobs Model forecast a Democratic presidential candidate two-party popular vote share of 56.6%, which would deliver the incumbent party the biggest defeat of any post-World War II contest (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). However, we argued, from our analysis of different experimental and observational evidence, that this unprecedented victory would be prevented by racially intolerant voters. We estimated the net racial cost of being a black candidate and corrected our overall forecast downward to 50.1% for Barack Obama. The unparalleled economic crisis, initiated after the release of our summer forecasts, prompted a reconsideration; the unique shock to the economy was no ordinary campaign perturbation. We calculated that the ensuing boost to anti-incumbent economic voting would add approximately two percentage points to the opposition; therefore, we issued a public revision of our forecast to 52.0 % for Obama (Lewis-Beck 2008). We are pleased that this final forecast fell so close to the actual result of 53.5%. Nevertheless, we contend the actual result should have been much closer to our original forecast. Given the dismal state of the polity and the economy prior to the election, the Obama victory should have been much bigger, as we show below. Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/155 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/155 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:38 PDT 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 forecast from seven teams of statistical modelers was off 2.6 percentage points (Campbell 2004, 734). We believe that the Jobs Model was more accurate because it broadened measurement of economic performance, a conceptual variable lying at the core of most of these efforts. Take, as a representative example, the Growth Model in Table 1, Column 1. Its forecast for George W. Bush was 54.0% (almost exactly at the median for the above-mentioned group of forecasters). This model was earlier reported by us, but rejected on grounds of specification error (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004, 754). We argued that the changing nature of the American economy required attention to a hitherto neglected variable—job creation. When this variable, new jobs over the presidential term, is added to the Growth Model, the fit statistics improve dramatically (see Table 1, Column 2,). Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/154 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/154 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:36 PDT 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 attention from forecasters outside the social sciences, in fields such as engineering and commerce. Noteworthy here is the recent special issue on U.S. presidential election forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting, containing some 10 different papers (Campbell and Lewis-Beck 2008). Our contribution in that special issue explored the question of whether our Jobs Model, off by only 1 percentage point in its 2004 forecast, was a simple product of data-mining (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/153 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/153 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:34 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/152 http://works.bepress.com/michael_lewis_beck/152 Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:54:32 PDT Michael S. Lewis-Beck Political Science