voter turnout in the industrial democracies during the 1980s there are two contending accounts of cross national variation in voter turnout rates one emphasizes the role of institutions and electoral attributes whereas the other stresses cultural and historical factors the authors evaluate the merits of these two arguments they first apply the model developed by r w jackman to turnout rates during the 1980s expanding the sample of industrial states to include three newer democracies with recent authoritarian histories greece portugal and spain they then examine the potential impact of cultural variables on voter turnout rates the authors conclude that the institutional argument outperforms the cultural account of conventional political participation

low intensity democracy revisited the effects of economic liberalization on political activity in latin america existing literature emphasizes the disorganizing or weakening effects of economic liberalization on civil society whereby free market policies are said to demobilize and depoliticize collective actors the article evaluates the effects of economic liberalization on large scale societal mobilizations across seventeen latin american countries for the period 1970 2000 the article further tests the effects of economic liberalization on individual political participation across sixteen latin american countries for the period 1980 2000 in contrast to the atomization literature this article provides strong evidence that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of societal mobilization in the context of free market democratization the article also demonstrates that economic liberalization does not induce a decline in political participation collectively these results cast doubt on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings presented in kurtz 2004

retail fuel price adjustment in germany a threshold cointegration approach abstract consumers in germany often complain that retail fuel prices usually adjust quickly to crude oil price increases than decreases and characterize this pricing pattern as market power exploitation in this paper we use both weekly national and daily city specific berlin hamburg munich and cologne data to investigate the extent to which retail fuel prices in germany adjust to changes in the international crude oil price at the national level with weekly prices we find positive asymmetries for both gasoline and diesel within the period 2003 2007 reflecting that retail prices react more swiftly to crude oil price increases than decreases in contrast for 2009 2013 we observe symmetric adjustment and negative asymmetry for retail diesel and gasoline prices respectively the city level analysis supports our findings in the latter time period thus regulatory measures aimed at the retail fuel market over recent years seem to have been effective and contrary to consumers perception we find no evidence for excessive market power or collusion

redistribution income and voting a model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed voting is modeled as a group rational activity voter turnout rates in the united states for the 1948 1960 1968 and 1980 elections are used to test the model voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution voter turnout also rises as real wages fall as educational attainment increases as elections become closer and as poll taxes and literacy tests are removed

evaluating interval forecasts a complete theory for evaluating interval forecasts has not been worked out to date most of the literature implicitly assumes homoskedastic errors even when this is clearly violated and proceed by merely testing for correct unconditional coverage consequently i set out to build a consistent framework for conditional interval forecast evaluation which is crucial when higher order moment dynamics are present the new methodology is demonstrated in an application to the exchange rate forecasting procedures advocated in risk management

turnout across democracies world democracies widely differ in legislative executive and legal institutions different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power we explore how these mappings affect voters participation in an election we show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters preferences we uncover a novel contest effect given the preferences distribution turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional power sharing system turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of power sharing moreover we generalize the competition effect common to models of endogenous turnout given the institutional environment turnout increases in the ex ante preferences evenness and more so when the overall system has lower power sharing these results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches including ethical voter models voter mobilization models and rational voter models

political scale and electoral turnout evidence from the less industrialized world this article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world it explo

information aggregation and turnout in proportional representation a laboratory experiment abstract this paper documents a laboratory experiment that analyzes voter participation in common interest proportional representation pr elections comparing this with majority rule consistent with theoretical predictions poorly informed voters in either system abstain from voting thereby shifting weight to those who are better informed a dilution problem makes mistakes especially costly under pr so abstention is higher in pr in contrast with private interest environments and welfare is lower deviations from nash equilibrium predictions can be accommodated by a logit version of quantal response equilibrium qre which allows for voter mistakes

counting the number of parties an alternative index i propose an alternative index to operationalize the variable number and size of parties in a party system to support it i present a critical overview of the two most common indices laakso and taagepera s effective number of parties and kesselman and wildgen s hyperfractionalization showing the causes of their weakness then i explain the computational logic of my alternative number of parties and compare it with the other two using hypothetical cases after that i contrast the laakso taagepera index with mine using data from actual elections between 1945 and 1981 i conclude that my index outperforms the other two as an operationalization of the variable number and size of parties

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

symmetric or asymmetric price adjustments in the oil market an empirical analysis of the relations between international and domestic prices in the federal republic of germany 1972 89 abstract this paper investigates how german consumer and wholesale prices for gasoline and light heating oil react to changes in the corresponding rotterdam prices monthly data from 1972 to 1989 are employed and the subperiods of the 1970s 1972 to 1979 and 1980s 1980 1989 are distinguished error correction models are estimated to seperate long run equilibrium relations and short run adjustment processes for the 1980s we find rapid symmetric and full adjustment of the german prices to the rotterdam prices whereas during the 1970s we find some asymmetries and at least for gasoline the adjustment processes took considerably more time

big data analytics in economics what have we learned so far and where should we go from here research into predictive accuracy testing remains at the forefront of the forecasting field one reason for this is that rankings of predictive accuracy across alternative models which under misspecification are loss function dependent are universally utilized to assess the usefulness of econometric models a second reason which corresponds to the objective of this paper is that researchers are currently focusing considerable attention on so called big data and on new and old tools that are available for the analysis of this data one of the objectives in this field is the assessment of whether big data leads to improvement in forecast accuracy in this survey paper we discuss some of the latest and most interesting methods currently available for analyzing and utilizing big data when the objective is improved prediction our discussion includes a summary of various so called dimension reduction shrinkage and machine learning methods as well as a summary of recent tools that are useful for ranking prediction models associated with the implementation of these methods we also provide a brief empirical illustration of big data in action in which we show that big data are indeed useful when predicting the term structure of interest rates

factor forecasting using international targeted predictors the case of german gdp abstract papers on factor forecasting are often focused on national data only this paper highlights the role of international data for forecasting german gdp and shows how targeted predictors as proposed by bai and ng forecasting economic time series using targeted predictors journal of econometrics 146 2008 304 317 can improve forecast accuracy

do gasoline prices exhibit asymmetry not usually previous studies have found evidence of asymmetric price adjustment in u s retail gasoline prices in that gasoline prices rise more rapidly in response to a cost increase than fall in response to a cost decrease by estimating a threshold cointegration model that allows for multiple regimes i am able to test how sensitive this result is to outlying observations in contrast to previous studies i find little evidence of asymmetry for the vast majority of observations and that the asymmetry is being driven by a small number of outlying observations

incompetence alienation or calculation explaining levels of invalid ballots and extra parliamentary votes this article focuses on the casting of invalid ballots and voting for extra parliamentary parties drawing on evidence from more than 200 elections in western europe australia new zealand and the americas during the 1980 2000 period it tests how well four sets of factors serve as explanations for the extent of such behavior in parliamentary contests the main finding is that the structure of political competition provides an important explanation for extra parliamentary voting and in particular the number of invalid ballots thus rather than being the unfortunate circumstances of an uninformed or incompetent electorate these forms of voting to a large extent appear to reflect a political situation that offers voters little effective choice in the form of clear alternatives

the size of government in majoritarian and consensus democracies this article looks at the effect of democratic institutions on the size of government with the help of the ordinary least squares regression analysis of data from the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries from 1974 to 1995 the study provides considerable evidence that the variance in the type of democracy measured by the lijphart index of majoritarian consensus political institutions has a systematic effect on the variance in the size of government measured both by total government outlays as well as total government revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product the article further argues that such institutional effects on the size of government are strengthened by partisan politics more specifically the analysis demonstrates the presence of the multiplicative interaction effect of the mutually reinforcing nature between the institutional structure and partisan composition of government in their association with the size of government

asymmetry in retail gasoline and crude oil price movements in the united states an application of hidden cointegration technique abstract there is a common belief that gasoline prices respond more quickly to crude oil price increases than decreases some economists and politicians believe that asymmetry in oil and gasoline price movements is the outcome of a non competitive gasoline market requiring that governments take policy action to address unfair pricing there is no consensus as to the existence or nature of the asymmetric relationship between prices of gasoline and crude oil much of this literature specifies asymmetry in the speed of adjustment and short run adjustment coefficients in contrast granger and yoon s granger c w and yoon g hidden cointegration university of california san diego department of economics working paper 2002 crouching error correction model cecm identifies asymmetry of the cointegrating vectors between components cumulative positive and negative changes of the series applying the cecm to retail gasoline and crude oil prices for the u s we find that there is only evidence of cointegration between positive components of crude oil prices and negative components of gasoline prices in contrast to the literature which attributes asymmetric price movements to market power of refiners these findings suggest that gasoline prices in the long run are more influenced by the technological changes on the demand side than crude oil price movements on the supply side

testing for price response asymmetries in the spanish fuel market new evidence from daily data abstract in this work we use daily data to examine pattern asymmetries in the speed of transmission of international wholesale oil prices to spanish retail fuel prices results are robust to two alternative specifications of an asymmetric error correction model for which the presence of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity for disturbances is modeled by a garch 1 1 process evidence indicates that the short term transmission of wholesale prices to retail prices is quite symmetric for both gasoline and diesel fuel nevertheless in contrast to some of the results provided for an earlier period we did not find asymmetries in the speed of retail price responses toward long run equilibrium our evidence also suggests that the use of weekly or lower frequency data is one of the possible explanations for some of the seemingly contradictory results concerning this issue

elections in the arab world why do citizens turn out this article examines the determinants of voting in competitive authoritarian regimes in the arab world in contrast to scholars who view elections in the arab world purely as patronage contests we argue that citizens also care about policy outputs and use turnout as a way to signal their approval or disapproval with the regime we draw on the literature on economic voting in democratic regimes to develop an argument about economic voting under authoritarian conditions and we propose a mediation model to get at the mechanisms of economic voting we test our argument with original data based on surveys conducted in seven arab countries between 2006 and 2009 our results show that although patronage helps to explain turnout especially among high income citizens policy outcomes are also important in the calculus of voting most voters turn out to vote to show approval of the regime and its economic performance

declining voter turnout in advanced industrial democracies 1950 to 1997 the effects of declining group mobilization past comparative voting behavior research has revealed that electoral institutions can explain much of the variation in voter turnout between nations this study takes an alternative and dynamic approach by identifying and explaining a pattern of turnout decline within industrial democracies which is beyond purely institutional explanation multivariate analysis of a pooled cross section of 18 industrial democracies between 1950 and 1997 suggests that turnout decline can best be explained in terms of changing patterns of group mobilization and electorate demographics the authors specifically point to the decline of unions and labor parties which have traditionally been associated with the mobilization of peripheral voters and the real increases in the cost of mobilization the authors control for institutional changes and find that they are less useful in explaining variation in turnout within advanced industrial democracies

do petrol prices rise faster than they fall when the market shows significant disequilibria abstract this paper examines if the long run relationship between retail and wholesale petrol prices is subject to adjustment asymmetric behaviour using weekly australian data 2007 2012 across 111 locations a short run dynamic model is specified in which three feedback coefficients capture three different types of disequilibria large and positive large and negative small positive negative significant evidence of asymmetric behaviour is found in 28 locations which are mainly in tasmania queensland and new south wales in these locations when prices are conspicuously above the equilibrium path retailers sluggishly lower their prices but when prices are substantially below the equilibrium values the adjustment speed is significantly faster

a deeper look at the proportionality turnout nexus evidence that turnout is higher under proportional representation pr than in majoritarian elections is overwhelming yet previous research has largely failed to explain why one line of argument maintains that higher turnout under pr is a by product of larger party systems however a larger number of parties has been demonstrated to depress turnout alternatively it is argued that majoritarian electoral systems tend to produce safe seats and that voters have little incentive to turn out there thus uneven turnout over electoral districts due to variable intensities of local competition is made responsible for the lower overall turnout empirical evidence on this conjecture is scant this article scrutinizes the relationship between electoral rules competition and turnout with district level data from 31 national elections results from a heteroscedastic model indicate that lower net turnout in majoritarian systems is indeed a consequence of uneven turnout over districts due to variable levels of lo

the welfare state turnout and the economy a comparative analysis while the economic voting literature is voluminous comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how or whether the economy affects turnout i address this issue by examining national elections in 29 countries using time series data the initial findings are replicated by a case study of american presidential and midterm elections since 1896 it is argued that the effect of economic adversity depends upon the degree of welfare state development this relationship is argued to be nonlinear so that mobilization occurs at either extreme while withdrawal obtains in the middle range the importance to democratic theory the study of elections and the politics of welfare policy are discussed

factor augmented varma models with macroeconomic applications we study the relationship between vector autoregressive moving average varma and factor representations of a vector stochastic process we observe that in general vector time series and factors cannot both follow finite order var models instead a var factor dynamics induces a varma process while a var process entails varma factors we propose to combine factor and varma modeling by using factor augmented varma favarma models this approach is applied to forecasting key macroeconomic aggregates using large u s and canadian monthly panels the results show that favarma models yield substantial improvements over standard factor models including precise representations of the effect and transmission of monetary policy

perspectives on positive political economy this volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned this new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy grounded in the rational actor methodology of microeconomics positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions more analytical than traditional approaches it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real world experience may be compared its focus is on empirical regularities and its goal is theoretical explanation the field has focused on three main areas of research models of collective action constraints on competitive market processes and the analysis of transaction costs developments in all of these areas are covered in the book the first part of the volume surveys the field while the second part displays positive political economy at work examining a variety of subjects the final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field

unequal participation democracy s unresolved dilemma presidential address american political science association 1996 low voter turnout is a serious democratic problem for five reasons 1 it means unequal turnout that is systematically biased against less well to do citizens 2 unequal turnout spells unequal political influence 3 u s voter turnout is especially low but measured as percent of voting age population it is also relatively low in most other countries 4 turnout in midterm regional local and supranational elections less salient but by no means unimportant elections tends to be especially poor 5 turnout appears to be declining everywhere the problem of inequality can be solved by institutional mechanisms that maximize turnout one option is the combination of voter friendly registration rules proportional representation infrequent elections weekend voting and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections the other option which can maximize turnout by itself is compulsory voting its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it

in sample inference and forecasting in misspecified factor models this article considers in sample prediction and out of sample forecasting in regressions with many exogenous predictors we consider four dimension reduction devices principal components ridge landweber fridman and partial least squares we derive rates of convergence for two representative models an ill posed model and an approximate factor model the theory is developed for a large cross section and a large time series as all these methods depend on a tuning parameter to be selected we also propose data driven selection methods based on cross validation and establish their optimality monte carlo simulations and an empirical application to forecasting inflation and output growth in the u s show that data reduction methods outperform conventional methods in several relevant settings and might effectively guard against instabilities in predictors forecasting ability

economic performance and turnout at national and local elections this paper analyzes the impact of economic performance on voter turnout we estimate an economic turnout model in which local economic variables are included in quadratic form so that non linear effects can be taken into account we use panel datasets covering municipalities from 1979 to 2005 and cross sections of parishes freguesias to analyze the determinants of turnout at portuguese municipal and legislative elections the empirical results indicate that the performance of the national economy is important only in legislative elections and that the regional and local unemployment rates tend to have non linear relationships to turnout the results obtained for flemish municipalities also provide evidence in favor of a non linear effect of unemployment on turnout

macroeconomic forecasting using diffusion indexes this article studies forecasting a macroeconomic time series variable using a large number of predictors the predictors are summarized using a small number of indexes constructed by principal component analysis an approximate dynamic factor model serves as the statistical framework for the estimation of the indexes and construction of the forecasts the method is used to construct 6 12 and 24 monthahead forecasts for eight monthly u s macroeconomic time series using 215 predictors in simulated real time from 1970 through 1998 during this sample period these new forecasts outperformed univariate autoregressions small vector autoregressions and leading indicator models