Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2005
The Jobs Model of presidential election forecasting predicted well in 2004. The model, based on data available in August 2004, generated an error of only 1.3 percentage points when forecasting the incumbent share of the two-party popular vote (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004). In contrast, the median forecast from seven teams of statistical modelers was off 2.6 percentage points (Campbell 2004, 734). We believe that the Jobs Model was more accurate because it broadened measurement of economic performance, a conceptual variable lying at the core of most of these efforts. Take, as a representative example, the Growth Model in Table 1, Column 1. Its forecast for George W. Bush was 54.0% (almost exactly at the median for the above-mentioned group of forecasters). This model was earlier reported by us, but rejected on grounds of specification error (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004, 754). We argued that the changing nature of the American economy required attention to a hitherto neglected variable—job creation. When this variable, new jobs over the presidential term, is added to the Growth Model, the fit statistics improve dramatically (see Table 1, Column 2,).
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.