Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier mention a curious fact:
Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in afascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. That’s a lot of votes, certainly more than the margin of victory in a tight race. And these results aren’t based on just a handful of games or political seasons; the data were taken from 62 big-time college teams from 1964 to 2008.
And Andrew Gelman signs off on it.
I took a look at the study (I felt obliged to, as it combined two of my interests) and it seemed reasonable to me. There certainly could be some big selection bias going on that the authors (and I) didn’t think of, but I saw no obvious problems. So for now I’ll take their result at face value and will assume a 2 percentage-point effect. I’ll assume that this would be +1% for the incumbent party and -1% for the other party, I assume.
Let’s try this:
- Incumbents have an advantage on average.
- Higher overall turnout therefore implies a bigger margin for the incumbent, again on average.
- In sports, the home team has an advantage on average.
- Conditions that increase overall scoring amplify the advantage of the home team.
- Good weather increases overall turnout in an election and overall scoring in a football game.
So what looks like football causes elections could really be just good weather causes both. Note well, I have not actually read the paper but I did search for the word weather and it appears nowhere.
12 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 29, 2012 at 9:31 am
Daniel
I have seen a related study. Incumbents get more votes in those regions where the winning lottery tickets are sold. http://www.fedea.es/pub/Papers/2011/dt2011-01.pdf
October 29, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Luis Aguiar-Conraria
“So what looks like football causes elections could really be just good weather causes both.”
In his blog, Andrew replied to a not totally dissimilar argument with these words: No, that won’t work because they did a placebo control test where they looked at the effect of a win right after the election, and it had no effect.
October 29, 2012 at 4:33 pm
Anonymous
which translates to good weather right after an election has no effect on the election. i don’t think this disproves the statement jeff made. unless i missed something?
October 29, 2012 at 4:48 pm
Aguiar-Conraria
I would say that the probability of good weather one day after the election is the same as the probability of good weather one day before the election. Therefore, if winning the game one day before the election is capturing the effect of good weather on the election day, the same result should hold for winning the game one day after the election, don’t you agree?
October 29, 2012 at 10:08 pm
jeff
Elections are held on Tuesdays, college football games are on Saturdays. True its a small difference.
But forget about that. The weather has a huge impact on turnout and for sure that’s going to affect the incumbent’s chances. We should be suspicious of any study that doesn’t use weather as a control.
October 30, 2012 at 3:55 pm
pd
Why would weather amplify the home team’s advantage? That seems to make no sense to me.
October 30, 2012 at 9:45 pm
jeff
Good weather makes it easier to score.
October 30, 2012 at 9:53 pm
PD
For BOTH teams. This makes the over an attractive bet, but I don’t see how it affects the likelihood of the home team winning unless you are talking about extreme weather events (ala the Ice Bowl of 1950).
I guess it’s a testable prediction whether or not there are more upsets when the weather is “worse.”
October 30, 2012 at 10:35 pm
jeff
Take soccer for example. Suppose that in a 5 minute time interval the home team scores with probability h and the visiting team with probability v where h>v. That’s the home team advantage.
But suppose that in bad weather these probabilities are multiplied by q<1. Then bad weather makes it less likely the home team wins.
May 16, 2013 at 6:23 am
web hosting
I was recommended this website by my cousin. I am not sure whether this publish is written by him as no one else know such detailed about my trouble. You’re incredible! Thanks!
June 18, 2014 at 7:00 pm
財布・小物
I would love to introduce myself to you, I’m Len Kress.
To watch movies is what she loves charging. She used
to be unemployed but now he is really a debt collector but she plans on changing that
will. She currently lives in Oregon and he or she has precisely what she needs there.
She’s been working on her website for the time now. Certify it out here:
財布・小物
December 14, 2017 at 7:46 am
nike x riccardo tisci
The next time I learn a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I do know it was my choice to read, however I really thought youd have something interesting to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you can repair if you happen to werent too busy looking for attention.