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Economic Indicators and Election Prediction

UCLA political scientists, Lynn Vavreck shows in a post at Erza Klein’s WaPo blog that the unemployment rate is not the best predictor of election outcomes.  Instead, the place to look is GDP growth:

The data suggest that for every 1 percent growth in GDP from the fourth to the second quarter of an election year, an incumbent party can expect to pick up an additional 2.5 percentage points on Election Day.

The post is worth a look (and it has two graphs to boot!).

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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at Troy University. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. He is the author of Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia and is currently working on a comparative study of the US to 29 other democracies. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging at PoliBlog since 2003. Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. de stijl says:

    …that the unemployment rate is the best predictor of election outcomes. Instead, the place to look is GDO growth

    Steven,

    I think you’re missing a “not” from the first sentence.

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  2. @de stijl: Indeed I was–thanks for pointing that out.

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  3. (Not to mention the “GDO” typo…).

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