Recent political movements within the United States have raised concerns about the health of American democracy. With hyper-partisanship dividing the country and Donald Trump—the most unlikely, unsuitable, and unpopular presidential nominee of a major party in American history—securing the Republican nomination, the question emerges of whether democracy in America has gone awry.  And if so, is it too much or too little democracy that’s to blame?

To help address those questions, in this paper, Thomas E. Mann summarizes and discusses the findings of Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ ambitious treatise on American democracy: “Democracy for Realists.” Achen and Bartels contend that the traditional conception of voters as rational, attentive decision-makers does not hold against empirical evidence. Instead, voters are best understood as members of partisan groups, which influence their perception of candidates, issues, and even simple facts. According to Achen and Bartels, perceived social identities drive voting decisions, rather than rationality.

Mann notes that most scholars would agree that voters do not follow the expectations of idealistic models, but draws attention to competing theories that are far less damning to voters’ rationality. In particular, the research of Paul Sniderman and Arthur Lupia suggests that voters are far more capable than Achen and Bartels would assert. In their view, voters have enough rationality and information to ensure a well-functioning democracy.

As Mann summarizes the arguments:  Achen and Bartels believe that citizens and elections are held to impossible, idealistic standards in the folk theory of democracy, which perpetuates myths and works against government responsiveness. Sniderman and Lupia, on the other hand, are offended by those who dismiss citizens as ignorant and incompetent; they seek to defend voters’ dignity and demonstrate the rationality and efficacy of their behavior in American democracy.

What does this scholarship tell us about the coming presidential election, and the future of American democracy?  Ultimately, Mann concludes that Achen and Bartel’s perspective is not anti-democratic, even if it is built on a belief that too much importance is placed on the often random and myopic outcomes of elections.  Instead, Mann believes that “Democracy for Realists” reveals the real democratic deficit facing America is one stemming not from too much democracy, but  from “asymmetry in political resources and representation of different segments of American society.” Truly understanding this problem and its root cause is a step toward strengthening American democracy. 

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Last month’s decision by the Palestinian Authority to schedule municipal elections in early October hardly registered in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, much less here in Washington. In light of Hamas’ recent decision to take part in the process, however, those elections have suddenly taken on new meaning. While the election of some 414 village, town, and city councils across the West Bank and Gaza Strip will not change the face of the Palestinian leadership or alter the diplomatic impasse with Israel, local elections have the potential to unlock the current paralysis within Palestinian politics.

Although Palestinian law calls for local elections to take place every four years, they have only been held twice since the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 1993, only one of which could be deemed genuinely competitive. The first and only local elections to take place in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip were held in 2004-05, in which Hamas—in its first foray into electoral politics—made major gains. Local elections were again held in 2012, although this time Hamas boycotted the process, preventing the vote from taking place in Gaza and allowing Fatah to declare a sweeping, if somewhat hollow, victory. 

Hamas’ decision to take part in this year’s local elections was therefore something of a surprise. Indeed, Hamas initially expressed dismay at the announcement, accusing the leadership in Ramallah of acting without consulting the other parties. Moreover, should the elections proceed as planned on October 8, they would be the first competitive electoral contest in the occupied territories since Hamas defeated Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction in the 2006 legislative election. Those elections triggered an international boycott of the PA which eventually led to the split between Fatah and Hamas and the current political paralysis.

If nothing else, Hamas’ entry into the elections averts another needless internal crisis in Palestinian politics. A boycott by Hamas would likely have further entrenched the political and geographic division between the Fatah-dominated West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, while dealing yet another blow to the beleaguered National Consensus Government, which despite being accepted by both factions in April 2014 has yet to physically return to Gaza. Movement on the reconciliation track could also help push the long-stalled reconstruction of Gaza, which has yet to recover from the devastating war of 2014.

Hamas has little to lose from participating in an election that is unlikely to significantly alter the political landscape one way or the other...[and Fatah] has little to gain from “winning” another electoral process that is largely uncontested.

What explains Hamas’ apparent change of heart? For one, Hamas may believe it has an advantage over Fatah, which continues to suffer from widespread perceptions of corruption and incompetence—a perception reinforced by the collapse of the peace process as well as the unprecedented unpopularity of President Abbas. Hamas may also view the upcoming vote as a way to gauge its current standing and future prospects in anticipation of long-awaited legislative and presidential elections. Either way, Hamas has little to lose from participating in an election that is unlikely to significantly alter the political landscape one way or the other. 

Hamas’ decision to participate in the elections is welcome news for Palestinian voters eager to see the return of competitive elections and a revival of political life after years of stagnation. It even helps Fatah, which has little to gain from “winning” another electoral process that is largely uncontested. More important, as the party that lost both parliamentary elections and a civil war in 2006-07 and that remains the chief proponent of a failed process, Fatah desperately needs a political victory of some kind as well as a basis on which to stake its claim to legitimacy and continued grip on power.

That said, it is important not to overstate the significance of local elections, which in the end will do nothing to address the deeper problems facing Palestinians in the occupied territories, whether from Israel’s continued occupation and its ever-expanding settlement enterprise or the ongoing political dysfunction within their own ranks. On the other hand, the prospect of the first competitive Palestinian elections in a decade represents a small but significant ripple in the otherwise stagnant waters of Palestinian politics.

The U.S. nominee for the World Bank presidency, South Korean-born physician Jim Yong Kim, is one of three candidates for the post, along with Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and former Colombian finance minister Jose Antonio Ocampo. According to Colin Bradford, the presence of several viable candidates—from different parts of the world—for the World Bank presidency means that the entire international community could have a say in selecting the next World Bank president, rather than the U.S. nominee being automatically confirmed. This change in the nominating process, says Bradford, is good for the Bank because it reflects growing demands for representation from emerging economies.
 

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The need to confront and drive back the forces of the Islamic State (IS) has pushed long-term reform efforts in Iraq far down the list of priorities. Yet pressing economic reforms – such as restructuring and rebuilding the country’s energy sector – increasingly seem a strategic necessity, as oil prices have fallen far below government projections. How can politicians be persuaded to invest in Iraq’s long-term future at a time of imminent security threats? How can the efforts to reform the Iraqi electricity network be harnessed to reestablish government authority in newly retaken areas?

Luay Al-Khatteeb and Harry Istepanian address these questions through analysis of past attempts at electricity sector reform. They argue that even before IS advances plunged Iraq into a deep political and security crisis, divisions within the Iraqi parliament and various government agencies had stymied efforts at reform. Still, they note that improving the provision of electricity is a clear opportunity to improve basic services to its citizens, boosting government legitimacy and acceptance in areas under its control, especially as it seeks to retake territory from IS.

Khatteeb and Istepanian hold that a comprehensive strategy is needed, one that incorporates an expanded role for the private sector, rationalized electricity tariffs, and a host of technical fixes to improve efficiency. Ultimately, they contend, much will depend on whether the government of Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi views the IS threat as an excuse for inaction or an impetus for change.

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“For a not-for-profit it’s the equivalent of venture capital,” said Sir Ronald Cohen, chairman of the Global Social Impact Investing Steering Group, about impact bonds in his keynote address at a recent event at the Brookings Institution. Impact bonds combine results-based financing and impact investing, where investors provide upfront capital for a social service and government agencies, or donors, agree to pay investors back based on the outcomes of the service. At their best, they could allow for innovation, encourage performance management and adaptability, promote learning through evaluation, and create a clear case for investing in what works. However, impact bonds thus far have had immense transaction costs and there are risks that poor execution of the impact bond mechanism could have negative consequences for beneficiaries.

It has been six years since the first impact bond was implemented in March of 2010, and the field is beginning to move from an exploratory stage to looking at systemic change, as Tracy Palandjian, CEO and co-founder of Social Finance U.S. described. The event, “The Global Potential and Limitation of Impact Bonds,” served as a point of reflection for stakeholders at this pivotal stage of the field, bringing together over 500 individuals in the room and on the webcast, including practitioners developing impact bonds around the world. While context matters, there were notable similarities in the motivations and challenges across regions.

In our presentations of our research and subsequent panels, we focused on the potential value and challenges of combining results-based financing and impact investing through an impact bond. Shri Naveen Jain, mission director of the National Health Mission of Rajasthan, India, who is working to develop an impact bond for maternal and child health services across his entire state, pointed out that the value of a results-based financing contract to him was in the added transparency it provides—the government is able to see what they are paying for, keep service providers accountable, and incentivize providers to achieve better outcomes. Louise Savell, a director at Social Finance U.K., the entity that first put impact bonds on the map, explained that results-based financing contracts are often arranged such that only one portion of the contract is based on results. This, she explained prescribes a model and does not allow for flexibility; furthermore, it forces service providers to bear a significant risk. Impact bonds allow for the entirety of payments to be based on results, which gives the provider full flexibility (at least in theory), but puts the risk of service performance on the investor. The shift of risk to investors could be particularly useful for service delivery in conflict affected areas, where donors are often highly concerned about how money will be used, mentioned Francois de Borchgrave, co-founder and managing director of Kois Invest, who is working on an impact bond with the International Rescue Committee of the Red Cross. The panelists also emphasized that impact bonds are more powerful than results-based financing contracts alone because, if successful, they pay real financial returns to investors. This draws a great deal of attention from policymakers and the public, and the added scrutiny helps in making the investment case for preventive interventions highly explicit. Mayor Ben McAdams of Salt Lake County, Utah said that “data and evidence is bridging a partisan divide” in his state—when the case for investment is clear, policymakers from both sides of the aisle are willing to invest. Impact bonds do not necessarily add value by increasing the total amount of funding available for social services, because investors are repaid if outcomes are achieved. Rather, impact bonds could help increase the outcomes achieved with given funding.

Overall there was agreement that impact bonds have enormous potential to lead to more outcome-focused financing that focuses on preventive interventions and incentivizes collaboration. However two critical considerations for the use of impact bonds arose throughout the day.

The first consideration discussed was whether or not impact bonds can support innovation or scale. As found in our first report, impact bonds have been relatively small in scale in terms of capital and beneficiaries. The average upfront investment in impact bonds to date is $3.7 million, reaching an average of 1,900 beneficiaries. They also have not, on average, focused on particularly innovative interventions—in fact they have almost all had a relatively strong base of evidence behind them. Views on the panel differed on whether the uses of impact bonds could be expanded—if they could be used for highly innovative pilot programs or proven large scale programs. One perspective was that impact bonds could indeed provide seed capital to test new ideas for service delivery. This would require investors who are willing to test not only the innovation but also this relatively new financing mechanism. Given the high transaction costs that impact bonds entail, however, this may not be the most efficient use of resources. Impact bonds could also reach more beneficiaries per transaction (greater scale) with changes in public procurement and the creation of markets for tradeable impact bond assets. Government can play a role in facilitating larger impact bonds by creating central government outcome payment funds, providing tax breaks for investment in impact bonds, and enabling the development of investment vehicles, all of which are being implemented in the U.K. Impact bonds could also help effective social services reach scale by encouraging government to fund programs at scale after the impact bond is over or by improving data use and performance management in government-funded services broadly.

A second, and related, discussion happened around evaluation methodology—which may differ depending on whether the impact bond is intended to test an innovative intervention or scale an intervention already backed by significant evidence. The “gold standard” randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the only methodology that eliminates the possibility that impact could be attributed to something other than the intervention, though the majority of impact bonds thus far use evaluation methodologies that are less rigorous. The panelists explained that it is important, however, to consider the status quo—currently, less than 1 percent of U.S. federal spending on social services has been shown to be effective. The same is true in low- and middle-income countries, where there are relatively few impact evaluations given the number of interventions. At the end of the day, the government agency acting as the outcome funder must decide on the importance of attribution to trigger payment through the impact bond in view of the already available evidence of program effectiveness and weigh the criticism that might ensue in the absence of a valid counterfactual.

Though impact bonds are a potentially useful tool in the toolbox of many financing mechanisms, there are some significant constraints to their implementation. The biggest barrier to impact bonds and other results-based contracts is the administrative hurdle of contracting for outcomes. Peter Vanderwal, innovative financing lead at the Palladium Group, and Caroline Whistler, co-president and co-founder of Third Sector Capital Partners, both stated that governments often are unable or do not know how to contract for outcomes, and there is a need to invest in their capacity to do so. Appropriation schedules are part of this challenge, governments are often not allowed to appropriate for future years. When an audience member asked how we go about changing the culture in government to one of contracting for outcomes, Mayor McAdams answered that impact bonds may have a contagious effect—contracting for outcomes will be the expectation in the future. Additionally, the transaction costs of establishing the partnership are large relative to other mechanisms, though they may be worthwhile. Jim Sorenson, of the Sorenson Impact Center, pointed out that service provider capacity and data collection systems could be barriers to the development of future impact bonds. There is also still a long way to go in developing outcome measures and in particular in calibrating those outcome measures to low- and middle-income countries.

The influence that impact bonds have on the provision of quality services globally depends on the quality of implementation. With a rapidly growing market, there will inevitably be “bad” impact bonds in the future. To ensure that impact bonds are used as effectively as possible, governments and the research community have a pivotal role to play in asking the right questions: Will a results-based contract help improve outcomes in this particular case? What should the outcomes be to avoid perverse incentives or potentially negative externalities? And would an impact bond structure add value? 

Abstract

Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?” We demonstrate that polls of voter expectations consistently yield more accurate forecasts than polls of voter intentions. A small-scale structural model reveals that this is because we are polling from a broader information set, and voters respond as if they had polled twenty of their friends. This model also provides a rational interpretation for why respondents’ forecasts are correlated with their expectations. We also show that we can use expectations polls to extract accurate election forecasts even from extremely skewed samples.

I. Introduction

Since the advent of scientific polling in the 1930s, political pollsters have asked people whom they intend to vote for; occasionally, they have also asked who they think will win. Our task in this paper is long overdue: we ask which of these questions yields more accurate forecasts. That is, we evaluate the predictive power of the questions probing voters’ intentions with questions probing their expectations. Judging by the attention paid by pollsters, the press, and campaigns, the conventional wisdom appears to be that polls of voters’ intentions are more accurate than polls of their expectations.

Yet there are good reasons to believe that asking about expectations yields more greater insight. Survey respondents may possess much more information about the upcoming political race than that probed by the voting intention question. At a minimum, they know their own current voting intention, so the information set feeding into their expectations will be at least as rich as that captured by the voting intention question. Beyond this, they may also have information about the current voting intentions—both the preferred candidate and probability of voting—of their friends and family. So too, they have some sense of the likelihood that today’s expressed intention will be changed before it ultimately becomes an election-day vote. Our research is motivated by idea that the richer information embedded in these expectations data may yield more accurate forecasts.

We find robust evidence that polls probing voters’ expectations yield more accurate predictions of election outcomes than the usual questions asking about who they intend to vote for. By comparing the performance of these two questions only when they are asked of the exact same people in exactly the same survey, we effectively difference out the influence of all other factors. Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation question are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct. We can also assess the relative accuracy of the two methods by assessing the extent to which each can be informative in forecasting the final vote share; we find that relying on voters’ expectations rather than their intentions yield substantial and statistically significant increases in forecasting accuracy. An optimally-weighted average puts over 90% weight on the expectations-based forecasts. Once one knows the results of a poll of voters expectations, there is very little additional information left in the usual polls of voting intentions. Our findings remain robust to correcting for an array of known biases in voter intentions data.

The better performance of forecasts based on asking voters about their expectations rather than their intentions, varies somewhat, depending on the specific context. The expectations question performs particularly well when: voters are embedded in heterogeneous (and thus, informative) social networks; when they don’t rely too much on common information; when small samples are involved (when the extra information elicited by asking about intentions counters the large sampling error in polls of intentions); and at a point in the electoral cycle when voters are sufficiently engaged as to know what their friends and family are thinking.

Our findings also speak to several existing strands of research within election forecasting. A literature has emerged documenting that prediction markets tend to yield more accurate forecasts than polls (Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004; Berg, Nelson and Rietz, 2008). More recently, Rothschild (2009) has updated these findings in light of the 2008 Presidential and Senate races, showing that forecasts based on prediction markets yielded systematically more accurate forecasts of the likelihood of Obama winning each state than did the forecasts based on aggregated intention polls compiled by Nate Silver for the website FiveThirtyEight.com. One hypothesis for this superior performance is that because prediction markets ask traders to bet on outcomes, they effectively ask a different question, eliciting the expectations rather than intentions of participants. If correct, this suggests that much of the accuracy of prediction markets could be obtained simply by polling voters on their expectations, rather than intentions.

These results also speak to the possibility of producing useful forecasts from non-representative samples (Robinson, 1937), an issue of renewed significance in the era of expensive-to-reach cellphones and cheap online survey panels. Surveys of voting intentions depend critically on being able to poll representative cross-sections of the electorate. By contrast, we find that surveys of voter expectations can still be quite accurate, even when drawn from non-representative samples. The logic of this claim comes from the difference between asking about expectations, which may not systematically differ across demographic groups, and asking about intentions, which clearly do. Again, the connection to prediction markets is useful, as Berg and Rietz (2006) show that prediction markets have yielded accurate forecasts, despite drawing from an unrepresentative pool of overwhelmingly white, male, highly educated, high income, self-selected traders.

While questions probing voters’ expectations have been virtually ignored by political forecasters, they have received some interest from psychologists. In particular, Granberg and Brent (1983) document wishful thinking, in which people’s expectation about the likely outcome is positively correlated with what they want to happen. Thus, people who intend to vote Republican are also more likely to predict a Republican victory. This same correlation is also consistent with voters preferring the candidate they think will win, as in bandwagon effects, or gaining utility from being optimistic. We re-interpret this correlation through a rational lens, in which the respondents know their own voting intention with certainty and have knowledge about the voting intentions of their friends and family.

Our alternative approach to political forecasting also provides a new narrative of the ebb and flow of campaigns, which should inform ongoing political science research about which events really matter. For instance, through the 2004 campaign, polls of voter intentions suggested a volatile electorate as George W. Bush and John Kerry swapped the lead several times. By contrast, polls of voters’ expectations consistently showed the Bush was expected to win re-election. Likewise in 2008, despite volatility in the polls of voters’ intentions, Obama was expected to win in all of the last 17 expectations polls taken over the final months of the campaign. And in the 2012 Republican primary, polls of voters intentions at different points showed Mitt Romney trailing Donald Trump, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich and then Rick Santorum, while polls of expectations showed him consistently as the likely winner.

We believe that our findings provide tantalizing hints that similar methods could be useful in other forecasting domains. Market researchers ask variants of the voter intention question in an array of contexts, asking questions that elicit your preference for one product, over another. Likewise, indices of consumer confidence are partly based on the stated purchasing intentions of consumers, rather than their expectations about the purchase conditions for their community. The same insight that motivated our study—that people also have information on the plans of others—is also likely relevant in these other contexts. Thus, it seems plausible that survey research in many other domains may also benefit from paying greater attention to people’s expectations than to their intentions.

The rest of this paper proceeds as follows, In Section II, we describe our first cut of the data, illustrating the relative success of the two approaches to predicting the winner of elections. In Sections III and IV, we focus on evaluating their respective forecasts of the two-party vote share. Initially, in Section III we provide what we call naïve forecasts, which follow current practice by major pollsters; in Section IV we product statistically efficient forecasts, taking account of the insights of sophisticated modern political scientists. Section V provides out-of-sample forecasts based on the 2008 election. Section VI extends the assessment to a secondary data source which required substantial archival research to compile. In Section VII, we provide a small structural model which helps explain the higher degree of accuracy obtained from surveys of voter expectations. Section VIII characterizes the type of information that is reflected in voters’ expectation, arguing that it is largely idiosyncratic, rather than the sort of common information that might come from the mass media. Section IX assesses why it is that people’s expectations are correlated with their intentions. Section VI uses this model to show how we can obtain surprisingly accurate expectation-based forecasts with non-representative samples. We then conclude. To be clear about the structure of the argument: In the first part of the paper (through section IV) we simply present two alternative forecasting technologies and evaluate them, showing that expectations-based forecasts outperform those based on traditional intentions-based polls. We present these data without taking a strong position on why. But then in later sections we turn to trying to assess what explains this better performance. Because this assessment is model-based, our explanations are necessarily based on auxiliary assumptions (which we spell out).

Right now, we begin with our simplest and most transparent comparison of the forecasting ability of our two competing approaches.

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• Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations

The headlines seem pretty good. Unemployment fell a tick to 7.3 percent. And jobs growth continued, with payrolls expanding by 169,000 in August, which is just shy of the 175,000 new jobs that analysts were expecting.

But beneath the headline: blech!

The most important news was the revisions to what we had previously thought was a healthy and perhaps self-sustaining recovery. Instead, jobs growth in July was revised from 162,000, to a weak 104,000, and June was also revised downward. Taken together, this month's revisions means we've created 74,000 fewer jobs than previously believed. And the previous jobs report subtracted another 26,000 jobs through revisions. Moreover, for reasons that remain a mystery, revisions have tended to be pro-cyclical, meaning that the healthy recovery we thought we were having might have been expected to yield further upward revisions. All this means that analysts are hastily revising their views.

The other bad news comes from the household survey, where employment fell 115,000, leading the employment-to-population ratio to decline by 0.1 percentage points. So the decline in the unemployment rate isn't due to folks getting jobs; instead, it's due to people dropping out of the labor force.

I have two simple metrics I use to measure the "underlying" pace of jobs growth. The first puts 80% weight on the (more accurate) payrolls survey, and 20% weight on the noisier household survey. That measure suggests employment grew by only 112,000 in August. The alternative is to focus on the 3-month average of payrolls growth, which suggests we're creating slightly around 148,000 jobs per month.

Bottom line: This report says that we're barely creating enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate falling from its current high levels. Policymakers have been looking for a signal that the recovery has become self-sustaining. This report doesn't provide it. And until we're confident that the recovery will keep rolling on, we should delay either any monetary tightening, further fiscal cuts, and definitely postpone the legislative shenanigans that Congress is threatening.

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With the violence in the Middle East continuing, and further attacks on American soil in the name of Islam, the election campaigns have paid significant attention to policy issues related to the Middle East. But as both Republicans and Democrats prepare for their national conventions, how do Americans prioritize Middle East issues compared with other global priorities? Have public attitudes shifted in light of recent ISIS-inspired attacks overseas and at home and in response to heated campaign rhetoric? If so, in what direction?

On July 11, Brookings launched two new public opinion surveys focusing on American attitudes towards the Middle East, conducted by Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami: One was conducted just two weeks before the Orlando shooting, the other taken two weeks after—thus providing an opportunity to evaluate any shift in public attitudes. In addition, some of the same questions were asked in Telhami’s polls the previous two years, thus providing a further opportunity to evaluate trends. One of the polls also includes a significant oversample of millennials (18-34) for further demographic analysis.

Telhami was joined in discussion by William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at Brookings. Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

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By the end of May, citizens of Europe will have left the polling booths and a new European Parliament will have been directly elected for the eighth time in the institution’s history. Since the last elections were held in 2009 on the heels of the global financial crisis, the eurozone has developed stronger economic stability mechanisms, kept its membership intact, and even added additional members. Yet Europe also faces a resurgence of extreme nationalism, political fragmentation within nation-states, and frustration and protest driven by high rates of unemployment. There are very different visions for the future of Europe.

On June 3, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings hosted a discussion on Europe’s future and what Europe’s election results mean for critical choices like the formation of the new European Commission, fiscal policies, U.S.-EU relations, TTIP negotiations and the future of the EU-United Kingdom relationship. Some of the issues that were addressed are also analyzed in Europe’s Crisis, Europe’s Future, a recently published book (Brookings Press, April 2014) co-edited by Kemal Derviș and Jacques Mistral.

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• The European Elections and the Future of Europe

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For the first time in Turkey’s history, the electorate directly cast their votes for president earlier this week, overwhelmingly electing current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the position with 52 percent of the votes. After 12 years in power, Erdoğan’s victory was widely expected, even though the two main opposition parties chose Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as their common candidate in a rare show of unity, and Selahattin Demirtaş the leader of the main Kurdish political party in Turkey, tried hard to appeal to an electoral base beyond just Kurds. The impact of the election’s results, however, remains to be seen.

How should the election results be interpreted? Will Erdoğan succeed in transforming Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential one? Who will he chose as prime minister? What will this outcome mean for Turkey’s economic performance and its foreign policy at a time when the neighborhood is sliding deeper into instability, if not chaos? What will happen to Turkey’s European vocation and its transatlantic relations?

On September 4, the Turkey Project of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings hosted a panel discussion to consider what President Erdoğan’s new mandate means for the nation, its government and institutions and the ruling Justice and Development Party. Kemal Kirisci, TÜSİAD senior fellow and Turkey project director, moderated the conversation. Panelists included Robert Wexler of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, Kadir Üstün of the SETA Foundation, and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Ömer Taşpınar.

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As Turkey prepares for highly-contested elections on November 1, concerns are growing about the country’s politics, economy, security, and foreign policy. Just a few years ago Turkey was recognized as a model of democracy and beacon of stability and economic growth in a challenging region. However, more recently, Turkey’s economy has lost its dynamism, its leaders’ commitment to democratic principles seems to be eroding, and doubts are emerging about the country’s interests and engagement in the region. Even more disturbing, as the conflicts in Syria and Iraq continue unabated and massive refugee flows spill over into Europe, violent Islamic extremism has now surfaced in Turkey. With the government and opposition trading accusations, the horrific, recent bombing attack in Ankara has further polarized an already deeply-divided and anxious country.

On November 2, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings will host a discussion on the Turkish elections. Panelists will discuss how recent events might influence voters what the election results might portend for Turkey’s strategic orientation. Panelists will include Ömer Taşpınar of the National War College and Brookings; Gönül Tol of the Middle East Institute; Kadir Üstün of the SETA Foundation; and Robert Wexler of S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. Brookings Turkey Project Director and TÜSİAD Senior Fellow Kemal Kirişci will moderate the discussion.

After the program, panelists will take questions from the audience.

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This weekend’s election results in Turkey were a surprise to the vast majority of Turkish pollsters and pundits, myself included. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won nearly 50 percent of the popular vote. The party can now form a single-party government, even if it doesn’t have the supermajority necessary to remake the Turkish constitution. What happened?

As with much in life, the result does make sense in hindsight. Prior to the June 7 election, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP leadership had supported a Kurdish peace process, in part in the hope of gaining Kurdish votes. In that election, however, not only did the AKP fail to win new Kurdish votes, but support for the Nationalist Action Party (MHP)—a far-right Turkish nationalist party—swelled, apparently out of frustration among nationalist Turks with the AKP-led peace process with the Kurds. In other words, the AKP had the worst of both worlds.

Erdoğan and the AKP leadership, recognizing the political problem this posed for them, allowed the peace process to collapse amid mounting instability driven by the Syrian civil war. This, combined with disillusionment with the MHP leadership due to their perceived unwillingness to form a coalition government, drove about two million MHP voters to the AKP this weekend. The exodus shows, in a sense, what close substitutes the two parties can be among a more nationalist voting bloc.

The controlled chaos that resulted from the collapse of the peace process—combined with the escalating refugee crisis, the fear of ISIS attacks, and the struggling economy—helped the government politically. Voters evidently recalled that it had been the AKP that brought the country out of the very tough times of the 1990s.  

In contrast, the opposition parties seem to lack leadership and appear to promise only internal squabbles and indecisiveness. Craving security and stability, voters have now turned to the one party that appears to have the strength to provide it. In that sense, Erdoğan’s nationalist gambit—which was actually a well-conceived series of political maneuvers—worked. Even some one million conservative Kurdish voters returned to the AKP.

These voters perhaps did not notice the irony that the government had also engineered the instability they feared. In part, this success derives from government’s control over the media. These elections may have been free, in the sense that Turkish voters can cast a ballot for the candidates they want. But they were not fair. The state maintained tight control over traditional and social media alike. Freedom House and the Committee to Protect Journalists, among others, have cast doubt on Turkey’s press freedom credentials. Real opposition voices are difficult for media publish or voters to see on television. Thus, for example, Selahattin Demirtaş, the leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) and the most charismatic opposition politician in Turkey, had essentially no air time during the campaign.

There are some important upsides to the election results. For one, HDP again passed the 10 percent threshold to remain in parliament. That will help mitigate—though hardly erase—the polarization that grips the country, and will hopefully make government reconsider its abandonment of the Kurdish peace process.

More significantly, the AKP does not have what it needs to convert Turkey’s government structure into a presidential system, which would be a bad move for the country. The election results will undoubtedly revitalize Erdoğan’s push for a presidential regime in Turkey. But that requires changing the constitution, and the AKP did not achieve the supermajority that it would need to do that on its own.

Critically, changing to a presidential system will require some support from the opposition and even more importantly popular support via a referendum. As political strategists around the world have learned, people tend not to vote on the actual referendum item, per se, but based on more general opinions of their leadership. So to win a referendum on the presidential system, Erdoğan and his AKP colleagues would need to show improvements in the economy, in the security situation, on the Kurdish issue, on Syrian refugees, and on national stability more generally. Instability in Turkey, particularly the renewal of violence in the Kurdish region, will deter investment and deepen the economic slump throughout the country.

With its new majority, AKP leaders are now in a position of strength to negotiate with the HDP over Kurdish issues. The refugee crisis also means the government also has more leverage with the EU. If it chooses to use its strength to reach positive agreements on those fronts, the outcomes could be very good for the Turkish people.

To actually win a referendum on the presidential system, Erdoğan would have to work to depolarize his country. While the presidential system itself would not be good for Turkey, the process of getting there might be.

ABSTRACT:

Early experience with federal campaign finance reform suggests that the new law is fulfilling its primary objective of severing links between policymakers and large donors, and thus reducing the potential for corruption in the political process. Instead of languishing or seeking to circumvent the law, the national political parties have responded to the ban on soft money by increasing their hard money resources. While outside groups appear active, particularly on the Democratic side, their soft money financing should remain a small fraction of what candidates and parties will raise and spend in the 2004 Elections.

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Campaign finance remains one of the most important and controversial aspects of U.S. democracy, as shown by recent legislation, court challenges, and demands for reform. A new Brookings Institution Press book, Financing the 2004 Election, examines the implications that the costs and trends of 2004 have for the current elections.

On September 12, as the 2006 election cycle shifted into high gear, Brookings hosted a panel of experts on money and politics to examine how the year's campaign spending patterns compared to those in previous elections.

Brookings Senior Fellow Thomas Mann addressed these issues along with co-editors Anthony Corrado, Brookings nonresident senior fellow and professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and David Magleby, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and Dean of the School of Family, Home and Social Sciences at Brigham Young University in Utah.

The speakers compared candidate and party receipts of 2006 to date with those of 2002 and 2004, and examined the importance of the surge in individual donors and the role of 527 and 501(c) organizations. They also discussed how the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) performed in 2004 and how the 2006 elections further test federal elections legislation. The briefing was co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy.

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From “American Crossroads” to “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” so-called "super PACs" have emerged as the dominant new force in campaign finance. Created in the aftermath of two landmark court decisions and regulatory action and inaction by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), these independent spending-only political action committees are collecting unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations and unions to advocate for or against political candidates. The legal requirements they face—disclosure of donors and non-coordination with the candidates and campaigns they are supporting—have proven embarrassingly porous. Increasingly, super PACs are being formed to boost a single candidate and are often organized and funded by that candidate’s close friends, relatives and former staff members. Their presence is most visible in presidential elections but they are quickly moving to Senate and House elections.

On March 1, on the heels of the FEC’s February filing deadline, the Governance Studies program at Brookings hosted a discussion exploring the role of super PACs in the broader campaign finance landscape this election season. Anthony Corrado, professor of government at Colby College and a leading authority on campaign finance, and Trevor Potter, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former chairman of the FEC and lawyer to Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, presented. 

After the panel discussion, the speakers took audience questions. Participants joined the discussion on Twitter by using the hashtag #BISuperPAC.

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Super PACs have already spent tens of millions of dollars in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, with more to come. Expert Anthony Corrado says that the unlimited spending by the PACs, made possible by two Supreme Court decisions, is giving wealthy individuals unprecedented influence in the 2012 elections.

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Despite the attention on the mid-term races, few elections are competitive. Electoral competition, already low at the national level, is in decline in state and primary elections as well. Reformers, who point to gerrymandering and a host of other targets for change, argue that improving competition will produce voters who are more interested in elections, better-informed on issues, and more likely to turn out to the polls.

On October 27, the Brookings Institution—in conjunction with the Cato Institute and The Pew Research Center—presented a discussion and a groundbreaking survey exploring the attitudes and opinions of voters in competitive and noncompetitive congressional districts. The survey, part of Pew's regular polling on voter attitudes, was conducted through the weekend of October 21. A series of questions explored the public's perceptions, knowledge, and opinions about electoral competitiveness.

The discussion also explored a publication that addresses the startling lack of competition in our democratic system. The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics (Brookings, 2006), considers the historical development, legal background, and political aspects of a system that is supposed to be responsive and accountable, yet for many is becoming stagnant, self-perpetuating, and tone-deaf. Michael McDonald, editor and Brookings visiting fellow, moderated a discussion among co-editor John Samples, director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, and Andrew Kohut and Scott Keeter from The Pew Research Center, who also discussed the survey.

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The impending presidential election may be the election of a century. Record primary voting, floods of new registrations, more small campaign donors and highly rated political conventions show that people are intensely interested.

These indicators augur a high turnout. Undoubtedly, more people will vote than the 60 percent who turned out four years ago, which was the highest rate since 1968. The question is, how many more? If participation tops the 1960 level of 64 percent, then we must go all the way back to 1908 — literally a century of American politics — to find the next highest rate: 66 percent.

Lessons from the 1960 and 1908 elections explain why 2008 may see a historical election. Many people recall the 1960 election that pitted two familiar names, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Kennedy won one of the closest presidential elections in American history. As in sports, people are interested when two contestants are evenly matched. Just like those in 1960, pre-election polls today show a tight race between Barack Obama and John McCain. People perceive that their vote will help determine big issues of peace and prosperity. Further, an African-American or a woman will be elected, for the first time, to one of the country’s highest offices. Contrast this to 1996: People tuned out when pre-election polls showed President Bill Clinton cruising to reelection over Bob Dole.

The 1908 election was not particularly close and did not involve big issues. Republican William Howard Taft won by a landslide over third-time Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, whose “free silver” platform had lost its luster. What is notable is that the 1908 election occurred in the twilight of the political machines that dominated American politics throughout the latter half of the 19th century. These machines were built from the bottom up. Local ward bosses, who knew their neighbors intimately, dispensed jobs and favors for votes. (Ward bosses conjure images of big city politics, but rural political machines existed, too.) Political machines even paid supporters’ taxes in states that disenfranchised tax delinquents.

During the machine era, turnout rates routinely exceeded 80 percent. Paying people to vote, however, discomfited many. Progressive Era reforms near the turn of the 20th century rooted out the obvious corruption by creating a civil service to replace patronage jobs and adopting the secret ballot so that political machines could not monitor voting. The 1908 election was among the last where machines could still turn out voters.

There is mounting evidence that political machines had something right: Face-to-face contact is among the most effective means to activate voters. Today’s high-tech campaigns recreate the mobilization capacity of political machines. In place of ward bosses are local volunteers, and in place of bosses’ neighborly knowledge are sophisticated microtargeted voter profiles that reveal which voters are persuadable and which are loyal party supporters. The glue is the Internet, which provides an information infrastructure for campaigns to recruit and communicate with their volunteers.

It is tempting to give Democrats a mobilization edge. Obama’s efforts are highly visible, whereas McCain must rely on the tightlipped Republican National Committee. Obama does not employ the Democratic National Committee for this expensive campaign operation because he opted out of public financing. Indeed, recent presidential candidates — McCain included — usually raise money for voter mobilization through their national parties.

Before Obama is given an edge, we must caution that Republicans are better able to register themselves than are lower-income Democrats. Massive Democratic registration drives create a false impression that they are out-hustling Republicans. In 2004, Democratic-aligned organizations’ highly publicized efforts exceeded their voter turnout victory targets. These groups underestimated President Bush’s 72-hour voter mobilization efforts the weekend before the election, which effectively matched them voter for voter.

Still, Obama’s organization should not be discounted. Just four years ago, Democrats were still playing catch-up to Republicans. Now they are just as sophisticated and have recruited a large cadre of volunteers, including typically apathetic youth.

American campaigns have undergone a paradigm shift. They no longer consist primarily of mass appeals through television advertising; grass-roots organizing is now a critical component. If elections stay close and interesting, we will likely observe higher turnouts. No longer will we wonder why turnout is declining; rather, we will wonder why it is climbing. A revitalized ground game will likely emerge as one explanation in the decade to come.

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As the recent primary in Delaware attests, this year's midterm elections continue to offer unexpected twists and raise large questions. Will the Republicans take over the House and possibly the Senate? Or has the Republican wave ebbed? What role will President Obama play in rallying seemingly dispirited Democrats -- and what effect will reaction to the sluggish economy play in rallying Republicans? Is the Tea Party more an asset or a liability to the G.O.P.'s hopes? What effect will the inevitably narrowed partisan majorities have in the last two year's of Obama's first term? And how will contests for governorships and state legislatures around the nation affect redistricting and the shape of politics to come?

On October 4, a panel of Brookings Governance Studies scholars, moderated by Senior Fellow E.J. Dionne, Jr., attempted to answer these questions. Senior Fellow Thomas Mann provided an overview. Senior Fellow Sarah Binder discussed congressional dynamics under shrunken majorities or divided government. Senior Fellow William Galston offered his views on the administration’s policy prospects during the 112th Congress. Nonresident Senior Fellow Michael McDonald addressed electoral reapportionment and redistricting around the country.

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With little time remaining until the midterm elections, campaigning is intensifying and the outcome for control of Congress remains uncertain. Voter enthusiasm and turnout will be big factors in the elections, where Republicans have demonstrated a leg up in the party’s primaries.

On October 20, Brookings expert Michael McDonald answered your questions about what the polls and early voting are telling us about the upcoming midterm elections, in a live web chat moderated by POLITICO Assistant Editor Seung Min Kim. McDonald, with Seth McKee, is author of "Revenge of the Moderates," in today's POLITICO.

The transcript of this chat follows:

12:30 Seung Min Kim: Good afternoon, everyone! We have just under two weeks until the Nov. 2 midterm elections, and the Brookings Institution's Michael McDonald is here to answer your questions. Thanks and welcome, Michael.

12:30 [Comment From Dale Dean (Arlington): ] I was wondering from the historical record how closely early results mirror the actual results. Are there systemic distortions in early voting that are the same over many elections or do they differ with each election?

12:30 Michael McDonald: Early voting does not necessarily correspond with Election Day voting. Several data sources suggest the following: Overall, prior to 2008, more Republicans tended to vote early. In 2008, it was Democrats who voted early. We have to see 2010 will be a continuation of 2008 or a reversion to previous elections.

12:30 Michael McDonald: Another important factor is the number of early votes. For high early voting states like Oregon and Washington, essentially ALL votes will be cast early. In other states that require an excuse to vote absentee, the early voting electorate will be much smaller, and have a partisan character more similar to pre-2008.

12:31 [Comment From Katy Steinmetz: ] Are black voters going to turn out for Obama like they did in 2008? Why or why not? How big of a difference do you think this will make?

12:31 Michael McDonald: Since we started surveying, pollsters have found that midterm electorates -- compared to presidential electorates -- tend to be older, wealthier, better educated, and composed of fewer minorities. Sometimes Democrats can overcome this hurdle, as they did in 2006, of course. It would be highly unusual for African-Americans to vote at the same rate as they did in 2008. In some key races, in states with large minority populations, lowered levels of minority voting could be a critical determinant to the outcome.

12:32 [Comment From tim: ] Do the polls accurately reflect the relative turnout of Democrats, GOP and Independents?

12:33 Michael McDonald: Pollsters try as best they can. They try to forecast who is likely to vote by various methods that are not consistent across polling firms. So, this is as much as art as a science. There are a number of factors that may further affect the partisan composition of polls, such as if people are interviewed by live interviewers or automatically or whether or not cell phones are interviewed.

12:34 [Comment From Katy Steinmetz: ] When Republican pundits like Karl Rove predict gains of 60 or so seats in the House, does that help or hurt them (in terms of making Republicans complacent and driving Democrats to the polls)?

12:36 Michael McDonald: One of the big questions in this election is the relative effects of enthusiasm versus voter mobilization. Republicans are hoping the enthusiasm gap will help them to victory, while Democrats are banking on their organization to GOTV. So far as I can tell, neither side has a distinct edge yet.

12:37 [Comment From Casey (DC): ] I have a question about the margin of error. Let's say candidate A has been consistently polling a point above candidate B, with a 3% margin of error. Is the fact that A has beaten B in all recent polls statistically significant, even with a margin of error? That is, wouldn't it be misleading to claim that A and B are tied (due to the margin of error) since A has been beating B consistently in the same poll, even by just a point? If they're truly tied, wouldn't we see A beating B half the time and B beating A the other half??

12:41 Michael McDonald: To quickly review, the MoE is determined by the number of respondents to a survey, and it does not linearly decline as the number of respondents increases [it declines by a factor of 1/sqrt(# of respondents)]. Suppose you have two polls with 1,000 persons each, then. You may treat them as two polls of 2,000. So, the MoE would decline, but it may not decline as much as you might think. Further, as I describe above, different pollsters use different techniques to create likely voter screens (and many other survey issues), so the polls themselves are not entirely comparable.

12:42 Michael McDonald: As a general rule, I like averaging polls and looking at trends among the same pollster. If all the polls are moving in the same direction, I tend to believe that a trend is real and not just statistical noise.

12:43 Michael McDonald: Finally (I know a long answer!): never trust a single poll. Unfortunately, the media tend to report their poll, or a surprising poll, and disregard others.

12:43 [Comment From Jazziette Devereaux (AZ): ] Do you think that early voting can prevent voters from learning facts about candidates that are presented in the feverish last two weeks of the election?

12:44 Michael McDonald: My favorite example is a John Edwards voter who was upset in 2008 that he had cast his vote before he dropped out of the race.

12:46 Michael McDonald: Early voting has certainly changed campaign dynamics. No longer can an opponent release the October surprise the last week. Their opponent gets a chance to respond. And it makes elections more expensive since campaigns need to be active throughout the entire election period. So, there are pluses and minuses.

12:46 [Comment From Mark, Greenbelt: ] Is it your feeling that early voting favors one party over another generally, or is it all case-by-case?

12:48 Michael McDonald: Prior to 2008, more Republicans voted early. In 2010, more Democrats voted early. So, far more Democrats are voting early in 2008, so it may be that 2008 was a watershed election for early voting. Still, in a state-by-state basis, Republicans tend to do better among early voters in states that require an excuse to vote an absentee ballot (early voting rates are much lower, too!).

12:48 [Comment From Rosemarie (NH): ] How do you think negative campaigning impacts turnout?

12:50 Michael McDonald: It used to be that people thought negative campaigning decreased turnout, but since then, numerous studies have shown it increases turnout. People are apt to be interested in slowing down and watching the accident on the side of the road. The media certainly enjoy covering the most negative campaigns, too.

12:50 [Comment From Malcolm, DC: ] Do you have any stats about early voting so far, and can you draw any conclusions?

12:50 Michael McDonald: They are here. So far, over 2 million people have already voted!

12:52 [Comment From Borys Ortega: ] How do you see the Obama support base (liberals, young people, etc) in terms of enthusiasm?

12:52 Seung Min Kim: And in addition to that, it seems like the White House and Democrats are doing a lot more outreach to young voters, with the MTV/BET town halls and the large rallies at universities. Do you think that will have any effect, considering young people have a low turnout rate for midterm elections?

12:53 Michael McDonald: Since we began surveying, polls consistently show that young people, minorities, the poor and uneducated tend to vote at lower rates -- perhaps the most ironic thing about this election is that the people most affected by the economic downturn are the least likely to vote.

12:55 Michael McDonald: The Democrats need to counter the Republican enthusiasm by expanding the electorate. Their strategy is to do voter mobilization targeted at the low propensity midterm voters, like the youth. We will again have to see how effective the Democrat's mobilization will be compared to the Republican's enthusiasm.

12:55 [Comment From Rosemarie (NH): ] Has there been any correlation between the level and campaign spending (especially on advertising) and the results?

12:57 Michael McDonald: A funny statistic is that the more an incumbent spends, the worse they do. This is because they are spending to counter a threat from a viable challenger. This is why this is one of the most difficult questions to answer -- surprisingly. We do not know the marginal effect of another dollar spent because the other campaign is also spending money.

12:57 [Comment From Sally: ] There was a flap this week about Univision airing ads that seek to depress Hispanic voter turnout. How common is that practice?

12:59 Michael McDonald: Voter suppression targeted at minorities has a long and ignoble history in American politics. Generally, I think everyone should vote since democracy works best when its citizens are engaged. This particular episode may ultimately backfire since it may rile up Nevada Latinos in a campaign that has had many racial overtones.

1:00 [Comment From Drew C.: ] What's your evaluation of early vote-by-mail, vs. in-person voting? Are both being done well?

1:00 Michael McDonald: In 2008, approximately 500,000 mail ballots were rejected. These were people who thought they voted by their vote did not count.

1:02 Michael McDonald: Why does this happen? People do not follow the procedures properly -- the return the ballot in the wrong envelope, they do not sign the envelope, etc. I do like California's method of allowing voters to drop their ballots off on election day at their polling places. This allows poll workers to check that the voter followed procedures.

1:03 Michael McDonald: An advantage of in-person early voting is that these problems do not occur, and their is a chance for a voter and election administrators to fix any problems, such as a first time voter forgetting to bring mandatory ID.

1:03 [Comment From Nick, DC: ] Along the lines of what Sally was asking about, we hear a lot about voter suppression, and we also hear a lot about alleged voter fraud. Are either of them really very common? And are voting machines more subject to tampering than the old paper ballots?

1:05 Michael McDonald: Vote fraud -- someone actually intentionally casting an illegal vote -- is extremely rare. When it happens, it tend to happen among mail ballots. Although there are potentially security flaws with electronic machines, there is little evidence of tampering (of course, that may be because there is no way to check!).

1:06 [Comment From Peter G.: ] If you could make one voting reform nationwide to make the system work better, what would it be?

1:08 Michael McDonald: Universal voter registration. There is plenty of evidence that our system of requiring voters to register themselves does not work well. Just about every other advanced democracy registers their own voters. In states with Election Day registration, turnout is much higher (5 to 7 percentage points). So, not only would we increase turnout, but we would get third party organizations like the now-defunct ACORN our of the business of registering voters.

1:09 [Comment From Ben Griffiths: ] You said incumbents fare worse when they spend more. is the same true of challengers? I'm thinking this year of Sharron Angle's $14 million in Nevada. Is it even possible to spend that much in the time left?

1:10 Michael McDonald: The spending in Nevada is tremendous. Despite that likely about half the voters will have already voted by Election Day -- Nevada is a high turnout state -- I think the campaigns will continue spending to the end since the election appears to be going down to the wire.

1:11 Michael McDonald: As for your first question, there is a point where a challenger spends enough money to become viable, which triggers a response in spending from an incumbent.

1:11 [Comment From Rosemarie (NH): ] Is overall turnout higher in states that allow early voting?

1:13 Michael McDonald: I testified to the U.S. Senate that I believe the answer is yes, though the turnout effects are a modest one to two points in presidential elections. There are studies that find big turnout increases in non-presidential elections. Indeed, the very first usage of all-mail ballot elections was in local jurisdictions that needed to meet threshold turnout rates to pass local bond measures.

1:13 [Comment From Nancy: ] Which party gets the early bragging rights?

1:14 Michael McDonald: So far, Democrats have jack rabbited out of the starting line in most states where we have a clue of which party's registrants are voting early. Nevada is an interesting departure, where Democrats have a lead, but it is not as great as 2008.

1:14 [Comment From Carson P.: ] One of your Brookings colleagues - Bill Galston - has proposed the idea of mandatory voting, like they do in Australia. Could that work here? Is it a good idea?

1:15 Michael McDonald: Good luck trying to convince Americans that they will be fined if they do not vote. I do not think this is practical for the U.S., though it obviously increases turnout.

1:15 [Comment From Don: ] What are the prospects for Lisa Murkowski come election day? Do you think she has a realistic shot at beating Joe Miler?

1:16 Michael McDonald: The polls are close. I think it is anyone's game in Alaska. In fact, I wrote an op-ed with my co-author Seth McKee, which was published at Politico today.

1:16 [Comment From Greg Dworkin: ] Thanks for all your hard work on this! How 'institutionalized' do you see the early vote by the parties? are they incorporating early voting as part of GOTV or are they behind in realizing so many people vote early these days?

1:19 Michael McDonald: As I document with another co-author -- Tom Schaller -- the Democrats created a strong early voting GOTV organization in 2008, and Republicans only belatedly tried to mobilize their voters to vote early. We will have to see how well Democrats will roll over this organization to 2010. Eventually, I believe the Republicans will have to build as strong as an organization. Early voting allows a party to mobilize over a longer period of time.

1:19 [Comment From Mary H. Hager, PhD: ] Please clarify polling methodology. Who is reached; who is not. The role of technology (email, telephonic, etc.) in defining the subpopulation for polling data.

1:20 Michael McDonald: That is quite a tall order for a chat :) We discuss many of these issues on Pollster -- which now has a home in the politics section of Huffington Post (I also blog at Pollster).

1:21 [Comment From Don (Ossning, NY): ] Does Christine O'Donnell have a chance in Delaware?

1:21 Michael McDonald: No.

1:21 [Comment From Geoffrey V.: ] Over the years, I've gotten the sense that campaigns are moving faster, that there are more undecided voters and that many voters don't make up their minds until the last minute. Is that supported by the data?

1:23 Michael McDonald: Well, given the tremendous increase of early voting from 20% in 2004 to 30% in 2008, it appears that many voters are making up their minds sooner, not later. Still, in a midterm election, the rule has generally been that people tend to hold their ballots longer because they do not have as much information about the candidates. It appears that this election may break that previous pattern.

1:23 [Comment From Joan: ] Do you think compromise will come back to Congress after the midterms?

1:24 Michael McDonald: No. Historically, we still have a ways to go before we reach the highest levels of polarization in our politics observed in the late 19th century.

1:24 [Comment From Al Amundson, ND: ] It seems sometimes that pollsters are "surprised" by wins. Polling is so scientific these days, and there's so much money behind it -- how often does a real surprise actually occur?

1:25 Michael McDonald: Surprises more often occur in primary elections, where the electorate is difficult to predict and information is fluid. I do not expect we will be greatly surprised by the 2010 election outcomes.

1:25 [Comment From Rosemarie (NH): ] Do you think that even with early voting, people just want to get it over with, go in to vote and make up their minds while they read the ballot?

1:27 Michael McDonald: Want the campaigns to stop bugging you? Vote early if you can. Election officials track who has a mail ballot in hand and who has voted, and they share this information with the campaigns.

1:27 [Comment From Bert C.: ] How is Sharron Angle still holding on in Nevada even after her numerous public gaffes?

1:27 Michael McDonald: The economic crisis has hit Nevada VERY hard (and I don't often write in caps!).

1:28 [Comment From Peggy: ] What role do you think the Tea Party will play in future elections? Is this a one-off movement or something more serious in American politics?

1:30 Michael McDonald: Shameless plug: see my Politico op-ed. A conservative/populist movement is nothing new to American politics. At least in the short run, I expect the tea party to continue to be influential, especially if Republicans take the House -- I do not expect they will take the Senate as of today. Victories will further embolden the activists.

1:31 Michael McDonald: Thanks to everyone for your questions. Sorry I could not answer them all!

1:31 Seung Min Kim: And that's it for today. Thanks for all the great questions as we count down the days until Election Day. And thanks to Michael for his insightful answers!

The 2016 presidential election confronts the U.S. electorate with political choices more fundamental than any since 1964 and possibly since 1932. That statement may strike some as hyperbolic, but the policy differences between the two major parties and the positions of candidates vying for their presidential nominations support this claim.

A victorious Republican candidate would take office backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, possibly with heightened majorities and with the means to deliver on campaign promises. On the other hand, the coattails of a successful Democratic candidate might bring more Democrats to Congress, but that president would almost certainly have to work with a Republican House and, quite possibly, a still Republican Senate. The political wars would continue, but even a president engaged in continuous political trench warfare has the power to get a lot done.

Candidates always promise more than they can deliver and often deliver different policies from those they have promised. Every recent president has been buffeted by external events unanticipated when he took office. But this year, more than in half a century or more, the two parties offer a choice, not an echo. Here is a partial and selective list of key issues to illustrate what is at stake.

The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare or the ACA, passed both houses of Congress with not a single Republican vote. The five years since enactment of the ACA have not dampened Republican opposition.

The persistence and strength of opposition to the ACA is quite unlike post-enactment reactions to the Social Security Act of 1935 or the 1965 amendments that created Medicare. Both earlier programs were hotly debated and controversial. But a majority of both parties voted for the Social Security Act. A majority of House Republicans and a sizeable minority of Senate Republicans supported Medicare. In both cases, opponents not only became reconciled to the new laws but eventually participated in improving and extending them. Republican members of Congress overwhelmingly supported, and a Republican president endorsed, adding Disability Insurance to the Social Security Act.  In 2003, a Republican president proposed and fought for the addition of a drug benefit to Medicare.

The current situation bears no resemblance to those two situations. Five years after enactment of Obamacare, in contrast, every major candidate for the Republican presidential nomination has called for its repeal and replacement. So have the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and Majority Leader in the Senate.  

Just what 'repeal and replace' might look like under a GOP president remains unclear as ACA critics have not agreed on an alternative. Some plans would do away with some of the elements of Obamacare and scale back others. Some proposals would repeal the mandate that people carry insurance, the bar on 'medical underwriting' (a once-routine practice under which insurers vary premiums based on expected use of medical care), or the requirement that insurers sell plans to all potential customers. Other proposals would retain tax credits to help make insurance affordable but reduce their size, or would end rules specifying what 'adequate' insurance plans must cover.

Repeal is hard to imagine if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016. Even if repeal legislation could overcome a Senate filibuster, a Democratic president would likely veto it and an override would be improbable. 

But a compromise with horse-trading, once routine, might once again become possible. A Democratic president might agree to Republican-sponsored changes to the ACA, such as dropping the requirement that employers of 50 or more workers offer insurance to their employees, if Republicans agreed to changes in the ACA that supporters seek, such as the extension of tax credits to families now barred from them because one member has access to very costly employer-sponsored insurance.

In sum, the 2016 election will determine the future of the most far-reaching social insurance legislation in half a century.

Social Security faces a projected long-term gap between what it takes in and what it is scheduled to pay out. Every major Republican candidate has called for cutting benefits below those promised under current law. None has suggested any increase in payroll tax rates. Each Democratic candidate has proposed raising both revenues and benefits. Within those broad outlines, the specific proposals differ.

Most Republican candidates would cut benefits across the board or selectively for high earners. For example, Senator Ted Cruz proposes to link benefits to prices rather than wages, a switch that would reduce Social Security benefits relative to current law by steadily larger amounts: an estimated 29 percent by 2065 and 46 percent by 2090. He would allow younger workers to shift payroll taxes to private accounts. Donald Trump has proposed no cuts in Social Security because, he says, proposing cuts is inconsistent with winning elections and because meeting current statutory commitments is 'honoring a deal.' Trump also favors letting people invest part of their payroll taxes in private securities. He has not explained how he would make up the funding gap that would result if current benefits are honored but revenues to support them are reduced. Senator Marco Rubio has endorsed general benefit cuts, but he has also proposed to increase the minimum benefit. Three Republican candidates have proposed ending payroll taxes for older workers, a step that would add to the projected funding gap.

Democratic candidates, in contrast, would raise benefits, across-the-board or for selected groups—care givers or survivors. They would switch the price index used to adjust benefits for inflation to one that is tailored to consumption of the elderly and that analysts believe would raise benefits more rapidly than the index now in use. All would raise the ceiling on earnings subject to the payroll tax. Two would broaden the payroll tax base.

As these examples indicate, the two parties have quite different visions for Social Security. Major changes, such as those envisioned by some Republican candidates, are not easily realized, however. Before he became president, Ronald Reagan in numerous speeches called for restructuring Social Security. Those statements did not stop him from signing a 1983 law that restored financial balance to the very program against which he had inveighed but with few structural changes. George W. Bush sought to partially privatize Social Security, to no avail. Now, however, Social Security faces a funding gap that must eventually be filled. The discipline of Trust Fund financing means that tax increases, benefit cuts, or some combination of the two are inescapable. Action may be delayed beyond the next presidency, as current projections indicate that the Social Security Trust Fund and current revenues can sustain scheduled benefits until the mid 2030s. But that is not what the candidates propose. Voters face a choice, clear and stark, between a Democratic president who would try to maintain or raise benefits and would increase payroll taxes to pay for it, and a Republican president who would seek to cut benefits, oppose tax increases, and might well try to partially privatize Social Security.

On no other issue is the split between the two parties wider or the stakes in their disagreement higher than on measures to deal with global warming. Leading Republican candidates have denied that global warming is occurring (Trump), scorned evidence supporting the existence of global warming as bogus (Cruz), acknowledged that global warming is occurring but not because of human actions (Rubio, Carson), or admitted that it is occurring but dismissed it as not a pressing issue (Fiorina, Christie). Congressional Republicans oppose current Administration initiatives under the Clean Air Act to curb emission of greenhouse gases.

Democratic candidates uniformly agree that global warming is occurring and that it results from human activities. They support measures to lower those emissions by amounts similar to those embraced in the Paris accords of December 2015 as essential to curb the speed and ultimate extent of global warming.

Climate scientists and economists are nearly unanimous that unabated emissions of greenhouse gases pose serious risks of devastating and destabilizing outcomes—that climbing average temperatures could render some parts of the world uninhabitable, that increases in sea levels that will inundate coastal regions inhabited by tens of millions of people, and that storms, droughts, and other climatic events will be more frequent and more destructive. Immediate actions to curb emission of greenhouse gases can reduce these effects. But no actions can entirely avoid them, and delay is costly.  Environmental economists also agree, with little partisan division, that the way to proceed is to harness market forces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” 

The division between the parties on global warming is not new. In 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. That law would have capped and gradually lowered greenhouse gas emissions. Two hundred eleven Democrats but only 8 Republicans voted for the bill. The Senate took no action, and the proposal died.

Now Republicans are opposing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of regulations under the Clean Air Act to lower emissions by power plants, which account for 40 percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. The Clean Power Plan is a stop-gap measure. It applies only to power plants, not to other sources of emissions, and it is not nationally uniform. These shortcomings reflect the legislative authority on which the plan is based, the Clean Air Act. That law was designed to curb the local problem of air pollution, not the global damage from greenhouse gases. Environmental economists of both parties recognize that a tax or a cap on greenhouse gas emissions would be more effective and less costly than the current regulations, but superior alternatives are now politically unreachable.

Based on their statements, any of the current leading Republican candidates would back away from the recently negotiated Paris climate agreement, scuttle the Clean Power Plan, and resist any tax on greenhouse gas emissions. Any of the Democratic candidates would adhere to the Clean Power Plan and support the Paris climate agreement. One Democratic candidate has embraced a carbon tax. None has called for the extension of the Clean Power Plan to other emission sources, but such policies are consistent with their current statements.

The importance of global policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to exaggerate. While the United States acting alone cannot entirely solve the problem, resolute action by the world’s largest economy and second largest greenhouse gas emitter is essential, in concert with other nations, to forestall climate catastrophe.

If the next president serves two terms, as six of the last nine presidents have done, four currently sitting justices will be over age 86 and one over age 90 by the time that presidency ends—provided that they have not died or resigned.

The political views of the president have always shaped presidential choices regarding judicial appointments. As all carry life-time tenure, these appointments influence events long after the president has left office. The political importance of these appointments has always been enormous, but it is even greater now than in the past. One reason is that the jurisprudence of sitting Supreme Court justices now lines up more closely than in the past with that of the party of the president who appointed them. Republican presidents appointed all sitting justices identified as conservative; Democratic presidents appointed all sitting justices identified as liberal. The influence of the president’s politics extends to other judicial appointments as well.

A second reason is that recent judicial decisions have re-opened decisions once regarded as settled. The decision in the first case dealing with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), NFIB v. Sibelius is illustrative.

When the ACA was enacted, few observers doubted the power of the federal government to require people to carry health insurance. That power was based on a long line of decisions, dating back to the 1930s, under the Constitutional clause authorizing the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court rejected an older doctrine that had barred such regulations. The earlier doctrine dated from 1905 when the Court overturned a New York law that prohibited bakers from working more than 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The Court found in the 14^th Amendment, which prohibits any state from ‘depriving any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law,’ a right to contract previously invisible to jurists which it said the New York law violated. In the early- and mid-1930s, the Court used this doctrine to invalidate some New Deal legislation. Then the Court changed course and authorized a vast range of regulations under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.  It was on this line of cases that supporters of the ACA relied.

Nor did many observers doubt the power of Congress to require states to broaden Medicaid coverage as a condition for remaining in the Medicaid program and receiving federal matching grants to help them pay for required medical services.

To the surprise of most legal scholars, a 5-4 Supreme Court majority ruled in NFIB v. Sibelius that the Commerce Clause did not authorize the individual health insurance mandate. But it decided, also 5 to 4, that tax penalties could be imposed on those who fail to carry insurance. The tax saved the mandate. But the decision also raised questions about federal powers under the Commerce Clause. The Court also ruled that the Constitution barred the federal government from requiring states to expand Medicaid coverage as a condition for remaining in the program. This decision was odd, in that Congress certainly could constitutionally have achieved the same objective by repealing the old Medicaid program and enacting a new Medicaid program with the same rules as those contained in the ACA that states would have been free to join or not.

NFIB v. Sibelius and other cases the Court has recently heard or soon will hear raise questions about what additional attempts to regulate interstate commerce might be ruled unconstitutional and about what limits the Court might impose on Congress’s power to require states to implement legislated rules as a condition of receiving federal financial aid. The Court has also heard, or soon will hear, a series of cases of fundamental importance regarding campaign financing, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, abortion rights, the death penalty, the delegation of powers to federal regulatory agencies, voting rights, and rules under which people can seek redress in the courts for violation of their rights.

Throughout U.S. history, the American people have granted nine appointed judges the power to decide whether the actions taken by elected legislators are or are not consistent with a constitution written more than two centuries ago. As a practical matter, the Court could not maintain this sway if it deviated too far from public opinion. But the boundaries within which the Court has substantially unfettered discretion are wide, and within those limits the Supreme Court can profoundly limit or redirect the scope of legislative authority. The Supreme Court’s switch in the 1930s from doctrines under which much of the New Deal was found to be unconstitutional to other doctrines under which it was constitutional illustrates the Court’s sensitivity to public opinion and the profound influence of its decisions.

The bottom line is that the next president will likely appoint enough Supreme Court justices and other judges to shape the character of the Supreme Court and of lower courts with ramifications both broad and enduring on important aspects of every person’s life.

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The next president will preside over critical decisions relating to health care policy, Social Security, and environmental policy, and will shape the character of the Supreme Court for the next generation. Profound differences distinguish the two major parties on these and many other issues. A recent survey of members of the House of Representatives found that on a scale of ‘liberal to conservative’ the most conservative Democrat was more liberal than the least conservative Republican. Whatever their source, these divisions are real.  The examples cited here are sufficient to show that the 2016 election richly merits the overworked term 'watershed'—it will be the most consequential presidential election in a very long time.