Determinants of the Outcomes of Midterm Congressional Elections

American Political Science Review

Volumn 69, Issue 3, 1975, Pages 812-826

  Tufte, Edward R ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84971725020     PISSN: 00030554     EISSN: 15375943     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1958391     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. V. O. Key, Jr., Politics, Parties, and Pressure Groups, 5th ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964), pp. 567–568.
2. Donald E. Stokes and Warren E. Miller, “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (Winter, 1962), 531–546.
3. Angus Campbell, “Voters and Elections: Past and Present,” Journal of Politics, 26 (November, 1964), 745-757; Angus Campbell, “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (Fall, 1960), 397-118; and Key, pp. 568–569.
4. Barbara Hinckley, “Interpreting House Midterm Elections; Toward a Measurement of the In-Party's ‘Expected’ Loss of Seats,” American Political Science Review, 61 (September, 1967), 700.
5. Mark N. Franklin, “A ‘Non-election’ in America? Predicting the Results of the 1970 Mid-term Election for the U.S. House of Representatives,” British Journal of Political Science, 1 (October, 1971), 508–513. See also Anthony King, “Why All Governments Lose By-Elections,” New Society, March 21, 1968, pp. 413-415; Nigel Lawson, “A New Theory of By-Elections,” Spectator, November, 1968, pp. 651-652; and John D. Lees, “Campaigns and Parties—The 1970 American Mid-Term Elections and Beyond,” Parliamentary Affairs, 24 (Autumn, 1971), 312–320. The view that midterms represent, in large measure, the electoral swing of the pendulum (or electoral surge and decline) does not seem to be held by politicians. Sam Kernell has compiled convincing evidence that a central premise among American politicians is that “the president's popularity directly affects his congressional party candidates' chances for election” in midterms: Sam Kernell, “Presidential Popularity and Negative Voting: An Alternative Explanation of the Mid-Term Electoral Decline of the President's Party,” paper delivered at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. See also the variety of interpretations of the outcome of British by-elections in Chris Cook and John Ramsden, eds., By-Elections in British Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973). Alternative midterm models are discussed in Richard W. Boyd and James T. Murphy, “How Many Seats Will the Republicans Lose? Changes in the House: A Prediction,” New Republic, October 24, 1970, pp. 12–14.
6. Key, p. 569.
7. Arseneau and Wolfinger, p. 3. Several other recent studies have greatly reinforced the evidence linking evaluations of the incumbent president to electoral choices in congressional races. See Kernell, “Presidential Popularity and Negative Voting,” for an extensive analysis of Gallup poll data in six midterm elections; and James E. Piereson, “Presidential Popularity and Midterm Voting at Different Electoral Levels,” American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming, November, 1975, which uses data from the 1970 election study conducted by the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan.
8. Gerald H. Kramer, “Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896-1964,” American Political Science Review, 65 (March, 1971), 131–143. A data error in this paper is corrected in its Bobbs-Merrill reprint (PS-498); see also Saul Goodman and Gerald H. Kramer, “Commentary on Arcelus and Meltzer, ‘The Effect of Aggregate Economic Conditions on Congressional Elections’,” American Political Science Review, forthcoming; Gerald H. Kramer and Susan J. Lepper, “Congressional Elections,” in The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History, ed. William O. Aydelotte, Allan G. Bogue, and Robert William Fogel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 256-284; and Susan J. Lepper, “Voting Behavior and Aggregate Policy Targets,” Public Choice, 18 (Summer, 1974), 67–81.
9. George J. Stigler, “General Economic Conditions and National Elections,” American Economic Review, 63 (May, 1973), 160-167; and further discussion by Paul W. McCracken, Arthur M. Okun, and others, pp. 169–180. Stigler's method might best be described as a “most squares” technique: find the specification that maximizes the error variance. But the outstanding work in discovering the pessimum most squares model is Francisco Arcelus and Allen H. Meltzer, “The Effect of Aggregate Economic Conditions on Congressional Elections,” American Political Science Review, forthcoming; see the reply of Goodman and Kramer.
10. On the translation of votes into seats, see Edward R. Tufte, “The Relationship Between Seats and Votes in Two-Party Systems,” American Political Science Review, 67 (June, 1973), 540–554.
11. Hinckley, “Interpreting House Midterm Elections;” Harvey Zeidenstein, “Measuring Congressional Seat Losses in Mid-Term Elections,” Journal of Politics, 34 (February, 1972), 272-276; and A. H. Taylor, “The Proportional Decline Hypothesis in English Elections,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 135 (1972), 365–369.
12. See the normalizations in William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale, “The Measurement of Electoral Change,” Political Methodology, 1 (Summer, 1974), 49-82; also William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale, “Electoral Competition and Partisan Realignment,” paper delivered at the 1973 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. The standard discussion is, of course, Philip E. Converse, “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” in Angus Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 9–39.
13. See Harvey M. Kabaker, “Estimating the Normal Vote in Congressional Elections,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 13 (February, 1969), 58–83.
14. The presidential approval ratings from 1946 to 1970 are from The Gallup Opinion Index, 64 (October, 1970), 16; the 1938 approval rate, 57 per cent, was averaged (because of inconsistencies in question wording and survey dates) from two surveys: September, 1938—“Are you for or against Roosevelt today?” 55.2 per cent; and October, 1938—“In general do you approve or disapprove of Roosevelt as President?” 59.6 percent. The source for the 1938 data is George Gallup, The Gallup Poll (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 118, 122. Similar, but not identical figures are reported in a fine study by Wesley C. Clark, “Economic Aspects of a President's Popularity” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1943), p. 47, which also contains an extensive discussion of the early years of the series. A flawed analysis of the factors affecting the ratings is given in John E. Mueller, “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson,” American Political Science Review, 64 (March, 1970), 18-34; and in John E. Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973). The substantive and statistical difficulties in Mueller's analysis are discussed in Richard A. Brody and Benjamin I. Page, “The Impact of Events on Presidential Popularity: The Johnson and Nixon Administrations,” paper delivered at the 1972 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; and in Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr., “Problems of Statistical Estimation and Causal Inference in Time-Series Regression Models,” in Sociological Methodology, 1973–1974, ed. Herbert Costner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974), pp. 252–308.
15. The details of the shifting wording are in Clark, Economic Aspects of a President's Popularity, pp. 47, 55–60.
16. Kramer, p. 139; see also Goodman and Kramer.
17. The yearly change in real disposable personal income per capita (in 1958 dollars) was computed from data in The Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1973 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 213; and The Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, 1971, p. 215.
18. The midterm of 1942 is omitted from the analysis because of the special effect of wartime controls on the economy and of wartime conditions on evaluations of the incumbent President. Kramer also dropped wartime years; see Kramer, p. 137.
19. In regressions of this sort, involving such a small number of degrees of freedom, some prefer to use a corrected R2 that takes into account the loss in degrees of freedom as the coefficients are estimated. In our case, the corrected R2 is 0.88. See Carl F. Christ, Econometric Models and Methods (New York: Wiley, 1966), pp. 509–510.
20. Kramer, p. 141.
21. Kernell, p. 32.
22. The discarding of observations one at a time coupled with re-estimation is the first step in producing a “jackknife” estimate of a complex statistic along with a confidence interval; see Frederick Mosteller and John W. Tukey, “Data Analysis, Including Statistics,” in Gardner Lindzey and Elliot Aronson, eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1968), pp. 133-160; and Rupert G. Miller, Jr., “The Jackknife—A Review,” Technical Report No. 50 (August 28, 1973), Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
23. Polls reported in Gallup, The Gallup Poll.
24. “Gallup Says Poll Shows Ford Popularity on Rise,” The New York Times, October 24, 1974.
25. “Poll Confirms GOP Fears,” The Washington Post, November 4, 1974, p. A5.
26. Vote as reported in The Gallup Opinion Index, 118 (April, 1975), p. 27.
27. Data sources: Gallup approval rating for October, 1974 from “Gallup Says Poll Shows Ford Popularity on Rise,” The New York Times, October 24, 1974; other months from The Gallup Opinion Index, 103 (January, 1974), 3; 108 (June, 1974), 1; and 111 (September, 1974), 12. The change in real disposable income per capita is available only by quarters and the monthly values are interpolated; it should also be noted that the quarterly figures are quite unstable, with provisional and final estimates often differing substantially. The computations are based on data in Bureau of Economic Analysis, Business Conditions Digest, January, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 69. The reports of polls asking people how they intended to vote in the 1974 congressional election are from “Poll Confirms GOP Fears,” The Washington Post, November 4, 1974, p. A-5; “Poll: Democrats Will Sweep Into the House,” New York Post, August 8, 1974, p. 24; and The Gallup Opinion Index, 110 (August, 1974), 1–4. Nonresponses have been divided equally between the two parties.
28. This technique is described in Tufte, “Seats and Votes,” pp. 549–551.
29. The causes of recent increases in congressional tenure are not yet clear; see David R. Mayhew, “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals,” Polity, 6 (Spring, 1974), 295-317; Walter Dean Burnham, “Communication,” and Edward R. Tufte, “Communication,” American Political Science Review, 68 (March, 1974), 207-213; and Robert S. Erikson, “Malapportionment, Gerrymandering, and Party Fortunes in Congressional Elections,” American Political Science Review, 66 (December, 1972), 1234–1255. Some consequences of seat changes are described in David W. Brady and Naomi B. Lynn, “Switched-Seat Congressional Districts: Their Effect on Party Voting and Public Policy,” American Journal of Political Science, 17 (August, 1973), 528–543.
30. Mueller, “Presidential Popularity,” p. 25.
31. Edward R. Tufte, “The Political Manipulation of the Economy: Influence of the Electoral Cycle on Macroeconomic Performance and Policy,” manuscript, Princeton, 1974.
32. Stokes and Miller, pp. 544–546.
33. See Stanley Kelley, Jr. and Thad Mirer, “The Simple Act of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 68 (June, 1974), 572–591.