Over the past two decades, a surge of interest in the area of forecasting has produced a number of statistical models available for predicting the winners of U.S. presidential elections. While historically the domain of individuals outside the scholarly community - such as political strategists, pollsters, and journalists - presidential election forecasting has become increasingly mainstream, as a number of prominent political scientists entered the forecasting arena. With the goal of making accurate predictions well in advance of the November election, these forecasters examine several important election "fundamentals" previously shown to impact national election outcomes. In general, most models employ some measure of presidential popularity as well as a variety of indicators assessing the economic conditions prior to the election. Advancing beyond the traditional, non-scientific approaches employed by prognosticators, politicos, and pundits, today's scientific models rely on decades of voting behavior research and sophisticated statistical techniques in making accurate point estimates of the incumbent's or his party's percentage of the popular two-party vote. As the latest evolution in presidential forecasting, these models represent the most accurate and reliable method of predicting elections to date. This thesis provides an assessment of forecasting models' underlying epistemological assumptions, theoretical foundations, and methodological approaches. Additionally, this study addresses forecasting's implications for related bodies of literature, particularly its impact on studies of campaign effects. / Master of Arts

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Yes / This paper makes use of a leading UK supermarket’s loyalty card based data which records information on purchase decisions by consumers who shop at its stores in order to assess the effectiveness and impact of the UK reduced salt campaign. We present an empirical analysis of consumption data to assess the effectiveness of the UK Food Standard Agency’s (FSA) ‘reduced salt campaign’ on the basis of information on health related announcements undertaken by the FSA under its ‘low salt campaign’. We adopt a general approach to determining structural breaks in consumption data, including making use of minimum LM unit root tests whereby structural breaks are endogenously determined from the data. We find evidence supporting the effectiveness of the FSA’s reduced salt campaign.

There is a great deal of work on campaign finance at the national level, however, state level research is sparse. My dissertation fills this void in the literature by examining the motivations of contributors to state legislators. The literature discusses two major motivations of contributors universalistic contributors, who hope to influence election outcomes, and particularistic contributors who hope to influence legislative votes. The primary hypothesis is that proximity to the general election is the primary factor in explaining contribution patterns in state legislatures; however, proximity to a legislative vote of interest to the contributor will also be significant in explaining contribution patterns. Additionally, the dissertation examines the impact of session limits on contribution patterns. I use campaign contribution data collected by the National Institute on Money in State Politics and select twenty-five bills in nine states to test the primary hypothesis. I use a contributor fixed effects model to test for increased or decreased levels of contributions for each contributor, given the proximity to the election and legislative votes important to the contributor. The results indicate that contributions increase across all states in the two months prior to the general and primary elections, and that proximity to the election is the most important factor in explaining campaign contributions in state legislatures. In 32% of all cases in the study, there was direct evidence of interest groups attempting to influence the outcome of legislative votes. Additionally, an increase in contributions close to a major legislative vote occurred in 77% of the cases without session limits, indicating that interest groups are highly active in attempting to influence policy outcomes. An additional examination of contribution patterns indicates that PACs shift their contributions to the beginning of the legislative session when faced with session limits. My research contributes to our understanding of the motives of campaign contributors and their actions when faced with legal restrictions on their contributions. This research, therefore, allows campaign finance reformers to make better reform decisions.