J. Scott Matthews

The Challenge of Municipal Voting: Vancouver 2002

Municipal elections are the poor cousins in the study of elections and voting behaviour. In Canada there has been no municipal election study analogous to the Canadian Election Study or the much less frequent provincial studies. The reason is likely institutional. Most municipalities in Canada use a ward system and parties have not formed. This makes an election survey impractical, since voters face many low-profile candidates with little to tie them together across wards. Voting for mayor might have been the subject of a survey, but mayoral races in Canada would seem to be idiosyncratic affairs driven mostly by personalities, not by issues or ideology. In this light, municipal elections may have been seen as mere case studies from which little can be generalized. The result is only a tiny literature relevant to judging the character or quality of municipal electoral behaviour in Canada ~Winn and McMenemy, 1973; Kushner et al., 1997!. Yet students of voting and elections neglect municipal electoral politics at their peril. Municipal elections offer the electoral analyst crucial

Why Do Citizens Discount the Future? Public Opinion and the Timing of Policy Consequences

It is widely assumed that citizens are myopic, weighing policies’ short-term consequences more heavily than long-term outcomes. Yet no study of public opinion has directly examined whether or why the timing of future policy consequences shapes citizens’ policy attitudes. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence and mechanisms of time-discounting in the mass public. The analysis yields evidence of significant discounting of delayed policy benefits and indicates that citizens’ policy bias towards the present derives in large part from uncertainty about the long term: uncertainty about both long-run processes of policy causation and long-term political commitments. There is, in contrast, little evidence that positive time-preferences (impatience) or consumption-smoothing are significant sources of myopic policy attitudes. Many of the most important policy choices facing governments involve long-term or slowly evolving problems. Challenges such as climate change, a rising pension burden, and diminishing supplies of oil and other natural resources are expected to generate their greatest social and economic impact decades from now. Most of the plausible solutions, however, require governments to act in the short run – to impose tax increases, benefit cuts or regulatory burdens on constituents in the near term. A wide range of policy predicaments, that is, confront governments and citizens with a stark intertemporal dilemma: whether to pay short-term social costs to invest in long-term social benefits. For elected officials, investment in the long run is usually thought to pose acute political risks. Prominent arguments and findings in the literatures on public policy making and political economy suggest that politicians face powerful incentives to maximize shortrun net policy benefits and that they invest in the long term only at their electoral peril. 1

Why did the polls overestimate Liberal Democrat support? Sources of polling error in the 2010 British general election

Abstract Pollsters once again found themselves in the firing line in the aftermath of the 2010 British general election. Many critics noted that nearly all pollsters in 2010 expected a substantial surge for the Liberal Democrats that did not materialize. Basing conclusions regarding the relative merits of pollsters or benefits of methodological design features on inspection of just the final poll from each pollster is inherently problematic, because each poll is subject to sampling error. This paper uses a state‐space model of polls from across the course of the 2010 election campaign which allows us to assess the extent to which particular pollsters systematically over‐ or under‐estimate each main party’s share of the vote, while allowing for both the usual margins of error for each poll and changes in public opinion from day‐to‐day. Thus, we can assess the evidence for systematic differences between pollsters’ results according to the use of particular methodologies, and estimate how much of the discrepancy between the final polls and the election outcome is due to methodological differences that are associated with systematic error in the polls. We find robust evidence of an over‐estimation in Liberal Democrat support, but do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that the polls erred due to a late swing away from the party, nor that any of the methodological choices made by pollsters were significantly associated with this over‐estimation.

The courts/parliament trade-off: Canadian attitudes on judicial influence in public policy

Do citizens have meaningful attitudes – i.e. enduring, subjectively important and psychologically consequential evaluative orientations – regarding the relative roles of courts and legislatures in resolving contentious issues of public policy? If so, what explains these preferences? Using data from the Canadian Election Study, the authors find that Canadians possess meaningful attitudes on what they term the ‘courts/parliament trade-off’. They also find significant heterogeneity across levels of political knowledge in the nature of these attitudes. Further, most determinants of attitudes on the courts/parliament trade-off can be understood to reflect evaluations of political outcomes under the courts or Parliament, rather than assessments of processes within these institutions. Attitudes on the trade-off are largely interpretable as responses to dynamic features of party politics.

Inequality and Electoral Accountability: Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude.

Issue Priming Revisited: Susceptible Voters and Detectable Effects

It is widely claimed that campaign communications direct voter attention to the considerations that campaigns emphasize, a phenomenon termed ‘priming’. In two recent studies, however, Gabriel Lenz concludes that reanalysis of key instances of priming in the literature shows that priming of views on policy questions, or ‘issues’, is very rare. This article revisits issue priming during elections by incorporating individuals who are largely excluded from Lenz’s analyses: respondents who, in one or more waves of the panel surveys analyzed, did not report a major-party vote (or vote intention) when interviewed. Based on data collected during six national elections, the article finds clear evidence of issue priming. The findings have implications for the study of campaign effects, media influence and voting behavior generally.