Election Forecast

Election Reform After the 2000 Election

The Trial-Heat Forecast of the 2008 Presidential Vote: Performance and Value Considerations in an Open-Seat Election

T he trial-heat forecasting equation grew out of an examination of Gallup’s trial-heat polls ~“if the election were held today, who would you vote for?”! at various points in election years as predictors of the November vote ~Campbell and Wink 1990!. My co-author Ken Wink and I found, not surprisingly, that polls as literal forecasts were not very accurate until just before the election, that t...

The Politics of Budgeting: Evaluating the Effects of the Political Election Cycle on State-level Budget Forecast Errors

Budget forecasts are used by incumbent governments as a political tool to manage the elector particularly during an election cycle (Bruck and Stephan 2006). Incumbents apply budget forecasts strategically. They use short-term forecasts, which are more likely to be unbiased by political factors, annually. They rely on long-term forecasts, which are likely to be biased by political calculations, ...

Density forecast revisions and forecast efficiency

We explain that revisions to successive density forecasts of the same outcome, as measured by the Kullback-Leibler Information Criterion, need not be unpredictable, unlike those to conditional mean forecasts, even when the forecaster uses information efficiently. However one can still test the efficiency of fixed-event conditional density forecasts, similarly to conditional mean forecasts, by t...

Election Systems

The various election systems used throughout the world can be divided into three families: Plurality-Majority, Proportional, and Semi-Proportional. Each family has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. All three families of systems can be used for electing legislative bodies, such as the state legislature, city councils, and school boards. For executive offices, such as governo...