Matthew J. Lebo

War President The Approval Ratings of George W. Bush

The authors estimate a model of the job approval ratings of President George W. Bush that includes five sets of variables: a “honeymoon” effect, an autoregressive function that tracks a decline in approval, measures of economic performance, measures of important “rally events,” and a measure of the costs of war—in this case, the U.S. death toll in the Iraq War. Several significant effects are found, including the rally that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001; the commencement of the war in Iraq; and the capture of Baghdad in April 2003. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, however, the casualties of war have had a significant negative impact on Bush’s approval ratings. Although the effects of additional battle deaths in Iraq will decrease approval only marginally, results suggest that there is also little prospect for sustained improvement so long as casualties continue to accumulate.

Fractional (Co)integration and Governing Party Support in Britain

Recent developments in the analysis of long-memoried processes provide important leverage for analysing time-series variables of interest to political scientists. This article provides an accessible exposition of these methods and illustrates their utility for addressing protracted controversies regarding the political economy of party support in Britain. Estimates of the fractionally differencing parameter, d, reveal that governing party support, prime ministerial approval and economic evaluations are long-memoried and non-stationary, and that governing party support and prime ministerial approval are fractionally cointegrated. Pace conventional wisdom that party leader images matter little, if at all, analyses of multivariate fractional error correction models show that prime ministerial approval has important short-run and long-run effects on party support. Prospective and retrospective personal economic evaluations are influential but, contrary to a longstanding claim, national economic evaluations are not significant. The article concludes by suggesting that individual-level heterogeneity is a likely source of the observed aggregate-level fractional integration in governing party support and its determinants. Specifying parsimonious models that incorporate theoretically meaningful heterogeneity is a challenging topic for future research. The history of science testifies that methodological innovation can provide important leverage for addressing theoretical controversies. In this article, we provide an accessible exposition of leading-edge statistical methods for analysing long-memoried time series, and employ these methods to address protracted debates concerning the political economy of public support for parties and party leaders in Britain. After reviewing the controversies at issue, we introduce the concepts of long memory and fractional integration, and consider why one might expect key variables in party support models to be fractionally integrated. Next, we discuss the concepts of fractional cointegration and fractionally integrated error correction mechanisms, and analyse the memory properties of political and economic variables of interest. Multivariate fractional error correction models are used to investigate the determinants of governing party support, and encompassing tests are employed to address disputes about the explanatory efficacy of various kinds of economic evaluations. In the conclusion, we summarize major findings and discuss methodological and theoretical implications for future studies of party support in Britain and elsewhere. CONTINUING C ONTROVERSIES

The PM and the Pendulum: Dynamic Forecasting of British Elections

We apply a dynamic perspective to forecasting votes and seats in British elections. Our vote model captures the swing of the electoral pendulum between the two major parties while using prime ministerial approval as the (sole) short-run predictor of vote choice. The seat model incorporates the inertia of the previous seat distribution while translating votes into seats. The models forecast the lead of one major party over the other (percentage for votes and number for seats). The statistical estimation includes data on British elections since 1945, although the test for cycles (swing of the electoral pendulum) goes as far back as 1832. The vote model picks the winner of every one of the 1945–2005 elections (out-of-sample forecasts) and is rarely off by more than 2 percentage points. The seat model does almost as well, rarely missing the seat lead by more than 25.

The President's Role in the Partisan Congressional Arena

Models of presidential success have sometimes focused on the importance of political capital and sometimes looked at the partisan environment of Congress. We develop time-series models of success that refine and integrate these perspectives while reframing the matter in terms of research on congressional parties. Measures of the ideological and partisan makeup of Congress are used to explain presidential success from 1953 to 2006 but the approval of the president’s base is important as well. We also show the electoral consequences to congressional parties of presidential success — congressional parties gain and lose seats based on the battles won and lost by the president. This gives legislators (not) of his party an incentive to see his agenda implemented (defeated). Studying both the causes and consequences of presidential success in Congress is meant to integrate theories of the two institutions along with extant theories of party behavior.

The Comparative Dynamics of Party Support in Great Britain: Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats

Abstract Political leadership has long been established as a key determinant of party support. Yet the extent to which this may vary across parties in and out of government is less well understood. In fact, there are good reasons to expect leadership to matter less for “protest” parties. We demonstrate that the relationship between satisfaction with the Liberal Democratic leader and support for the British Liberal Democratic Party is fundamentally different from the relationships between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and their respective parties. Using 28 years of monthly public opinion data, we develop models of the political and economic factors that determine support for each of the three major parties in Britain in each of the 1979–1997 and 1997–2006 periods. We find that vote intentions for the two major parties are closely related to the satisfaction levels of their respective leaders but that this relationship is substantially weaker for the Liberal Democrats. These findings are in contrast to individual‐level studies that have shown the importance of leadership approval to vote choice for all British parties. More generally, we show the need to refine theories about the relationships between parties and their leaders.

Strategic Party Government and the 2010 Elections

This article applies the strategic parties framework to the 111th Congress and 2010 election results that followed. In 2009-2010, the Democrats pursued an ambitious agenda over the nearly unanimous opposition of Congressional Republicans, leading to a high level of partisanship on both sides. This partisanship was costly in the 2010 elections. Like other papers on this election, we find some evidence that key roll calls were linked to decreased electoral vote share. However, the clearer pattern is that overall patterns of partisanship had a consistent detrimental effect on incumbents running for reelection.

The Impact of Economic Versus Institutional Factors in Elite Evaluations of Presidential Progress Toward Democracy in Latin America

Elites’ support for democracy and their satisfaction with political leadership are important factors in evaluating Latin American leaders’ progress toward consolidating their democracies. However, we know surprisingly little about how elites understand or define democracy and thereby evaluate leaders in terms of progress toward democracy. Much literature on opinions of elites focuses on their relative interest in democratic values and formal institutions. But is progress in these two areas really of utmost importance to elites? To better understand elite views of democracy, the authors use new survey data in which elites assess current politicians’ progress toward democracy. They find that the importance of perceived progress in democratic values—civil rights and civil liberties—and formal institutions is minor compared to the impact of perceptions of economic progress; elites’ evaluations of democratic progress depend primarily on their perceptions of economic success and only secondarily on perceptions of achievement of democratic values.

Divided Government, United Approval: The Dynamics of Congressional and Presidential Approval

A theory of partisan control might expect that during times of divided government, approval of Congress and the presidency would move in opposite directions. Yet, the congressional approval question is an ambiguous one in the minds of voters and makes understanding the movement of the aggregated series much more difficult. Here, monthly congressional and presidential approval data for the 1995-2005 period are studied and found to move in tandem, even during periods of divided government. Multivariate ARFIMA models show a strong and positive relationship between congressional approval and lagged presidential approval, even during the period of fiercely divided government under President Clinton. This means that, rather than paying attention to partisan control, the electorate transfers feelings about the president to the institution of Congress.

Long Memory Methods and Structural Breaks in Public Opinion Time Series: A Reply to Pickup

Mark Pickup does not take issue with our substantive conclusions about the relationship of Liberal Democratic support to leadership approval. However, he does argue that our claim that vote intention variables are fractionally integrated is unsubstantiated. Instead, he suggests that time series of electoral support might be stationary autoregressive processes with “equilibrium shifts” or “structural breaks”. Or, they could be “combined process”, asymptotically integrated of order 1. Either way, Pickup claims, such series would appear fractionally integrated in statistical tests. Pickup contends that if one of these alternate possibilities hold – or, he suggests, even if the series is truly fractionally integrated – we should avoid the “complications” associated with fractional integration and model electoral support as an autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) process. He adds that if one insists on fractional differencing to handle autocorrelation, then structural breaks must be accounted for in calculating the level of fractional integration, d . Due to these objections, our article does not make use of fractionally differenced variables in the main equations, as earlier iterations of the paper did. The substantive conclusions remained unaltered but we remain convinced that the use of fractional differencing is a superior way of modeling electoral support. We appreciate Pickup’s thoughtful response and the editors’ offer to us to explain why fractional integration methods are appropriate to studies of party support over time. Pickup’s arguments against the use of fractional integration (FI) techniques are based on two premises. First, he asks: “Are the added complications of fractional integration necessary?” That is, he assumes that FI is beset with “complications” from which ARMA models are free. With much respect, we nonetheless do not accept the premise of Pickup’s question. Pickup seems to define “simple” in a way we do not. To Pickup, simple does not

Forecasting British Elections: The ‘PM and the Pendulum’ Model Reconsidered

Various approaches have been taken to forecasting the outcomes of elections. The “PM and the Pendulum” model uses Prime Ministerial Approval as the sole short-term predictor of the vote in British General Elections. Here we test the forecasting power of this predictor against a close rival – Government Approval. Using a time-varying parameter estimator, we demonstrate that between elections and especially in the months preceding a General Election, PM Approval is the most accurate predictor of both governing party vote intentions and the actual vote on Election Day, as measured in governing party vote share. The autoregressive model for translating votes into seats, based on elections from 1910 onward, provides an almost exact prediction of the outcome of the 2010 contest.