As argued in a classic article, the role of campaigns in democracy is to inform voters about the candidates, especially about their policy stances. In a book I recently published, Follow the Leader (press release), I find considerable evidence that campaigns fulfill this role: voters often do ...

In deciding between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, we hope that voters are choosing between candidates based in part on candidates’ policy stances, such as their positions on taxes and war. In a book I have coming out this month, Follow the Leader (press release), I find surprisingly ...

After several years of negative or inconsistent growth, incomes grew at a robust annualized rate of 4.6% and 4.1% in the first two quarters of this year. As I summarized in an earlier Model Politics post, voters appear unduly influenced by election-year income growth. So, these numbers are ...

The intense focus of journalists and pundits on the disappointing monthly job report — only 69,000 jobs were created — points to one of the great mysteries of presidential voting: why voters care so much about the election-year economy. According to numerous studies, voters mostly ignore economic booms or busts ...

According to several recent studies, good-looking candidates win more often and with higher margins (1,2,3). Like his father, Mitt Romney just looks like a president. How much is that helping him?   Answering that question is hard. To investigate it, I ran a simple experiment ...