Michael S Lewis-Beck

Recent scholarship devotes considerable attention to how social identities influence vote choice. However, group sympathies or group affect constitute another, often overlooked subjective component of the relationship between social groups and vote choice. Based on reference group theory and drawing on ANES data as well as recent Danish and Austrian election surveys, we examine how voters’ sympathies with a range of groups are related to party choice across time and space. We find that group sympathies are related to vote choice in all three countries, even when controlling for objective group memberships and social identities. Across time, most relationships are stable or strengthening and comparable in strength to the relationship between group memberships and party choice. The relationship between group sympathies and vote choice is, furthermore, conditioned by perceived linkages between groups and parties. Hence, analyses of the role of social groups in voting also need to include group sympathies to grasp the full influence of social groups.

Recent elections in the United States are characterized by a strong urban-rural divide, with rural voters being more likely to vote for the Republican Party and Democratic support concentrated in large urban centers. While much attention has been given to the sources of Republican support among rural voters, less is known about how this divide has emerged over time. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), the Cooperative Election Study (CES), and the General Social Survey (GSS), we trace longitudinal trends in the association between living in rural areas and voting in US presidential elections. Our results show that the rural-urban divide was stable for an extended period of time but suddenly became more pronounced in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Comparative analysis reveals that this cleavage now surpasses gender and income divisions in importance, though it remains weaker than race and religious cleavages. We also show that this sudden strengthening of the rural-urban divide is driven by both rural Democrats switching to the Republican Party and urban Republicans switching to supporting Democratic candidates.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said humorist and social critic Mark Twain. Simply put, history often follows recurring cycles, enabling us to identify patterns that will likely repeat. Such supposed steadiness should bode well for prediction. Nevertheless, regarding structural election forecasts, most projections rely on short-term political fundamentals measuring macroeconomic performance or government or leader popularity. In this contribution, we take a structural approach but eschew any macroeconomic or popularity measure and instead rely on historical and structural patterns to predict the 2025 German Federal Election. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), our model predicts the vote share of Germany’s two largest blocs – the Union and the SPD – and All Others combined across 19 elections between 1953 and 2021 with solid accuracy (correctly predicting the winning bloc 3 out of 4 times), creating circumstances to assume Political History may be a helpful guide as to how the 2025 contest may pan out. Our ex-ante central projection for the 2025 German federal election foresees a cliffhanger race, with point estimates suggesting the Union and the SPD will win 26% of the vote each and All Others 48%, departing from the dominant narrative of the opinion polls of a clear CDU/CSU plurality vote victory and substantial losses for the SPD. The PH model suggests that the formation of another grand
coalition is possible.

We draw globally on a major election forecasting tool, political economy models. Vote intention polls in pre-election public surveys are a widely known approach; however, the lesser-known political economy models take a different scientific tack, relying on regression analysis and voting theory, particularly the force of “fundamentals.” We begin our discussion with two advanced industrial democracies, the US and UK. We then examine two less frequently forecasted cases, Mexico and Ghana, to highlight the potential for political-economic forecasting and the challenges faced. In evaluating the performance of political economy models, we argue for their accuracy but do not neglect lead time, parsimony, and transparency. Furthermore, we suggest how the political economic approach can be adapted to the changing landscape that democratic electorates face.

Using European Election Study (EES) surveys (2004 to 2024) from the six founding members (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands) of the European Union, we examine how economic perceptions affect vote choice in the European Parliament (EP) elections. Beginning with the second-order election thesis, i.e., voter behavior in EP elections is influenced by national politics, we investigate alternative economic voting hypotheses, culminating with a focus on the 2024 contests. We find the extant economic vote has remained stable, in the face of shocks such as the Great Recession or Brexit. Further, the economic perception effects appear competitive with the effects of left-right ideology and party identification. Economic voting remains a pivot for vote choice in EP elections, even in the face of emergent supra-national challenges, and shows no signs of diminishing as a result of the 2024 EP contests.

Political economy models have been applied to election forecasting for some time. However, in the United Kingdom, as well as elsewhere, other methodologies have come to the fore to take their place alongside the forecasting methodology of vote intention polling. Returning to a classic Political Economy model first successfully tested on the 2001 General Election, we ask whether it still has relevance today. After various time series analyses of UK general elections (1955 to the present), we find that it does. The model manages to forecast the vote share of the incumbent party rather accurately, via three predictor variables: economic performance, executive/prime ministerial approval, and the number of terms in office. For the 2024 contest, it forecasted, before-the-fact, a Conservative defeat of historic proportions.

Recent changes in electoral dynamics in France have raised questions about a possible erosion of the link between citizens’ ideological positioning on the left-right axis and their electoral choices. Using data from surveys spanning French presidential elections from 1988 to 2022, this article examines whether the relationship between ideology and voting has weakened in this country. Analyses reveal two main findings. First, the relative size of the major ideological groups in France—the far left, the left, the center, the right, and the far right—has changed relatively little over the period under study. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the strength of the relationship between voters’ self-positioning on the left-right axis and their reported vote in the first round of presidential elections in France has remained virtually the same between François Mitterrand’s election in 1988 and Emmanuel Macron’s re-election in 2022. However, this stability masks a transformation in the nature of the link between ideology and the presidential vote over time. Whereas in the past, voters at the extremes of the spectrum tended to defect in supporting a more moderate candidate from their camp, this trend has reversed in the last two presidential elections, when more moderate voters supported radical candidates. Beyond these trends, which may still evolve, results indicate that ideology continues to be a key factor associated with electoral behavior in France.

Election prediction flourishes among pollsters, the media, academics, and political anoraks, with four significant prognostic paradigms: opinion polls, markets, structural models, and hybrid approaches. Structural models, inspired by political science theory and based on so-called "fundamental" indicators, have a long pedigree in predicting government performance in elections cross-nationally. Despite their prevalence and prowess in forecasting contests for government, these structural models have not been applied to predict referendums, where the prognosis game, as far as it exists, primarily relies on polls. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that plebiscites can be especially hard to forecast given that citizens often vote on complex subjects not always salient in public discourse, partisan cues are sometimes lacking, and late opinion shifts are arguably more common than in elections. In this contribution, we break new ground by fusing two strands of political science literature - election forecasting and referendums - and devise a prediction model of plebiscites based on economic, institutional, and historical variables, thereby providing the first structural forecasting model to account for referendum adoption and support levels. We apply this model ex-post to 42 national referendums in Ireland between 1968 and 2024 to test its applicability ex-ante. In Europe, Ireland stands third only to Switzerland and Italy as polities that regularly employ referendums to decide public policy issues. With reasonable lead time, ex-post estimates of our model offer solid predictions of the referendums' outcome, with out-of-sample estimates calling the outcome correctly 68%-79% of the time, a remarkable feat given that the issues up for decision are varied. Moreover, we demonstrate that our model's predictions are competitive with opinion poll estimates of these contests, illustrating that while our model is not a panacea, it provides a reasonable starting point for predicting the outcomes of referendums in Ireland and, importantly, plants a vital seed for future work on forecasting plebiscites using model approaches.