Thomas M. Holbrook

ELECTORAL COMPETITION IN THE AMERICAN STATES

Electoral competition is a concept that has played a central role in much of the state politics literature. One commonly used indicator of competition in the states is the Ranney index. We offer an alternative indicator of competition, one based on district-level outcomes of state legislative elections. After evaluating both indicators in terms of validity and reliability, the analysis suggests that the district-level indicator is both empirically and intuitively superior as a measure of electoral competition. The implications of this finding are discussed.

I Seen My Opportunities and I Took 'Em: Political Corruption in the American States

This study is an empirical examination of political corruption in the American states. Using the number of public officials who are convicted of crimes involving corruption as the dependent variable, four explanations of corruption are examined--historical/cultural, political, structural, and bureaucratic. We find that corruption is associated with historical/cultural forces, political forces (especially turnout and party competition), and bureaucratic forces (government size and policies that increase bribe opportunities). Structural factors (e.g., campaign finance reporting requirements, centralization, direct democracy) are unrelated to the incidence of corruption. Finally, the study shows some evidence that prosecution of corrupt public officials was subject to partisan and racial targeting during the Reagan administration and racial targeting during the Carter administration.

Political Learning from Presidential Debates

This paper focuses on an important aspect of presidential debates: the degree to which voters are able to glean candidate information from them. Using an open-ended measure of candidate information, the analysis tests hypotheses concerning the impact of debates on information acquisition among the mass public for all debates from 1976 to 1996. The findings indicate that people do learn from debates and that learning is affected by the context in which the information is encountered. Specifically, early debates generate more learning than do subsequent debates, and the public tends to learn more about candidates with whom they are relatively unfamiliar than about better-known candidates.

Presidential Elections in Space and Time

In this study a state-level model of presidential election outcomes is developed and empirically tested for the years 1960 to 1984, using pooled cross-sectional analysis. The model specifies presidential elections as a function of long-term and short-term, political and economic, state-level and national variables. Several important findings emerge from the analysis. First, state-level presidential election outcomes are not responsive only to state or national factors but are reflections of both. The state of the national economy, presidential incumbency and popularity, state political ideology, and partisanship are found to be the most important determinants of presidential election outcomes. Second, although not as powerful, there is evidence of a fairly strong presidential home state advantage, as well as a somewhat weaker home region advantage. No such advantage is found for vicepresidential candidates. Finally, national factors are found to improve the accuracy of the model in some states (mostly Plains and Mountain West states) much more than in other states.

Presidential Campaigns and the Knowledge Gap

The knowledge gap hypothesis holds that when new information enters a social system via a mass media campaign, it is likely to exacerbate underlying inequalities in previously held information. Specifically, while people from all strata may learn new information as a result of a mass media campaign, those with higher levels of education are likely to learn more than those with low levels of education, and the informational gap between the two groups will expand. Though this hypothesis has received widespread attention in other disciplines, it has attracted relatively little attention in political science. Using data from the National Election Studies, this article investigates how well the knowledge gap hypothesis describes information acquisition in presidential campaigns from 1976 to 1996. The results of the analysis show that knowledge gaps do not always grow over the course of presidential campaigns and that some events, such as debates, may actually reduce the level of information inequality in the electorate.

Campaigns, National Conditions, and U.S. Presidential Elections

One unresolved debate in election studies concerns the relative importance of political campaigns and the national political and economic climate in determining election outcomes. In this paper, a model of candidate support that incorporates campaign variables and national conditions is developed and tested using trial heat data from the 1984, 1988, and 1992 presidential elections. The results of the analysis indicate that, while both sets of variables have a significant impact on public opinion, national conditions have a greater impact on determining election outcomes than do campaign events.

Incumbency, National Conditions, and the 2008 Presidential Election

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. The Incumbency and National Conditions Model predicted that John McCain would receive 44.3% of the two-party presidential vote; he ended up with 46.6% (at this writing, November 13, 2008), yielding a prediction error of 2.4 points. This error is slightly smaller than the mean absolute value of the out-of-sample forecasts from 1952 to 2004 (2.68), so the 2008 election result is not anomalous in the context of this model. The addition to the model of the 2008 outcome does not generate many important changes to the coefficients, except that the significance of incumbency interaction went from 0.08 to 0.02 and the standard error and adjusted R 2 of the model both indicate a slight improvement in fit.

Knowing Versus Caring: The Role of Affect and Cognition in Political Perceptions

This paper examines the importance of political knowledge in shaping accurate perceptions of the political world—specifically, how levels of general political knowledge influence the accuracy of specific political judgments, how those judgments might also be shaped by “wishful thinking,” and how political knowledge attenuates the impact of wishful thinking on political judgments. Predictions of who would win the U.S. presidential election in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996, as surveyed in the National Election Studies conducted in those years, were used as a measure of the accuracy of political perceptions. Analysis of these data reveals that both political knowledge and wishful thinking are important determinants of the accuracy of peoples perceptions; in addition, the impact of wishful thinking on perceptions is attenuated by political knowledge.

Reading the Political Tea Leaves: A Forecasting Model of Contemporary Presidential Elections

Building on the work of previous forecasters, I develop a model of presidential elections that deviates from earlier work by including a measure of aggregate personal finances. The results of the analysis indicate a highly accurate model and predict a Democratic victory in 1996. The discussion of findings emphasizes that, although the model predicts a Democratic victory, caution should be exercised before concluding that the outcome is cast in stone or that the campaign cannot make a difference.

Cognitive Style and Political Learning in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Campaign

This article explores the impact of cognitive style, as measured by need to evaluate and need for cognition, on information acquisition during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Election Study I show that both constructs are related to measures of candidate information, i.e., correct ideological placement, correct policy placement, and number of candidate articulations; but that need to evaluate has a much stronger and more consistent effect than does need for cognition. The implications of these findings are discussed.