Alfred G Cuzán
Biographic Data
| ID | 696181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alfred G Cuzán |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alfred G |
| FAMILY NAME | Cuzán |
| SIGNATURE | CUZÁN A G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of West Florida |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1239-1390 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Becoming an American Politologist
After escaping the Castro regime in Cuba via Mexico as a child, Alfred G. Cuzán came to the United States and started on his academic career path in political science. Looking back now, Cuzán sees that there were plenty of obstacles along the way, but a handful of faculty and editors willing to “take risks” made it possible for Cuzán to contribute to his goal of making political science a more fully developed discipline. In his remaining years of…
A General Path of Incumbencies
With a larger and more diverse set of countries than Cuzán and Heggen (2023a) studied, this article completes a general path of incumbencies that was partially traced by their “cruise and crash” model of the cost of ruling. The missing piece is a bump in the share of the vote in the party’s first reelection. The electoral “bonus” holds more or less steadily until the crash, at which point the vote plunges about 20% below the original win. The ana…
In Defense of the American Way of Electing Presidents
The Electoral College is a phrase used to describe the process for electing the president by states. Thus, it is an indispensable part of our “republic of states,” protects checks and balances and the federal distribution of power, making clean and orderly elections possible
A Geometric Model of Elections in Five Federal Democracies
In an analysis of 1,825 state or provincial election outcomes in five federal democracies the rate of decay of incumbency ( K ) serves to partition the distribution of the vote for the incumbent party, the party of the head of government, between those who win a subsequent term and those who do not. In conjunction with the mean and standard deviation of the distribution, the weighted mean of the vote in re-election and defeat is identified. The m…
A cruise-and-crash model of the cost of ruling
Since the publication of Nannestad and Paldam ([1999]. “The Cost of Ruling. A Foundation Stone for Two Theories,” University of Aarhus, Denmark. Working Paper No. 1999-9. http://www.martin.paldam.dk/Papers/Gamle/Cost-of-ruling.PDF.) on the cost of ruling, their finding that incumbents lose votes in the order of 2 to 3 percentage points per term has gained the status of something like an “inductive law” of politics (Budge [2019]. Politics. A Unifi…
Incumbent Party Reelection in Australia, Canada, and the United States: An Exponential Decay Model
Exponential functions, widely used in the physical sciences, also have been used to model political phenomena. To our knowledge, however, this tool has not been used to replicate the electoral survival of the government or administration in several democracies. This article reports that an exponential survival model is a good fit for the reelection rate of the party that controls the executive office in states, territories, or provinces in three …
On Duverger and “Laws of Politics”
In “In Laws of Politics and How to Establish Them,” Erik Weber contends that my arguments for the existence of “five laws of politics” are “inconclusive.” Although the “empirical evidence is impressive,” he avers, the “underlying social mechanisms” responsible for the adduced relationships are missing. Without it, he adds, no empirical relationship rises to the special status of a “law” of politics. Helpfully, Weber did not stop there. Using the …
The first two laws of politics: Nannestad and Paldam’s “Cost of Ruling” revisited
The Campbell Collection of Presidential Election Forecasts, 1984–2016: A Review
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Five Laws of Politics: A Follow-Up
In this follow-up to “Five Laws of Politics,” I show that the original estimates of electoral outcomes describing the five “laws” hold up with twice the number of elections and three times as many countries as in the original article. The analysis yields long-run equilibrium values for several electoral parameters that set limits to incumbent support in a democracy. The evidence lends additional support to the notion that elections in democracies…
A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The PollyVote Forecast for the 2016 American Presidential Election
The PollyVote applies a century-old principle of combining different evidence-based methods for forecasting the outcome of American presidential elections. In this article, we discuss the principles followed in constructing the PollyVote formula, summarize its components, review the accuracy of its previous forecasts, and make a prediction for this year's presidential election
Five Laws of Politics
Drawing on more than 500 elections from around the world, this article presents five empirical laws of politics. Four of these laws span democracies and dictatorships, and one sets a boundary between the two. In both regimes the governing party or coalition represents a minority of the electorate. In democracies this minority usually represents a plurality that amounts to about one third of the electorate. Judging by the outcome of the first free…
Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote
We review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts’ judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly …
Fiscal Model Failure: A Measurement Problem? A Preliminary Assessment
The Fiscal Model of presidential elections not only failed to predict that President Obama would win reelection handily, but the error incurred in the forecast of the incumbent share of the two-party vote was such (46.9% vs . 51.8% or more) as to warrant a rating of “inaccurate” or “quite inaccurate” in Campbell's table of benchmarks for evaluating forecasts (Campbell 2012, 611). This recap is a preliminary assessment of what went wrong
Forecasting the 2012 Presidential Election with the Fiscal Model
In March 2009, at a time when President Obama was basking in the glow of the honeymoon with the public every new president enjoys, I asked, “Will Barack Obama be a one-term president?” What prompted me to pose so impertinent a question at so hopeful a time was that the Office of Management and Budget was projecting that that year the federal government would spend 28% of gross domestic product (GDP). This amounted to a 7% point increase compared …
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: A Post-Mortem on “Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010?”
A bare-bones, “economic performance” model of the number of seats won by the president's party in U.S. House of Representatives elections, estimated over the 1914–2008 period, yielded a point forecast of 227 seats for the Democrats, a net loss of 30 seats relative to what the party held at the start of the 111th Congress (if estimated with midterm elections only; 27 seats, if estimated with all elections). However, there was a great deal of uncer…
Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010
Historically, statistical models for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006). However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007). One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914 (only the second time that …
Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election With the Fiscal Model: The Challenge Met
The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models. The presidential election forecast made with the Fiscal Model three months before Election Day put the incumbents' share of the two-party vote (VOTE2) at 48% (Cuzán and Bundrick 2008). As of the time of this writing, it appears the incumbent-par…
Predicting Presidential Elections with Equally Weighted Regressors in Fair's Equation and the Fiscal Model
Three-decade-old research suggests that although regression coefficients obtained with ordinary least squares (OLS) are optimal for fitting a model to a sample, unless the N over which the model was estimated is large, they are generally not very much superior and frequently inferior to equal weights or unit weights for making predictions in a validating sample. Yet, that research has yet to make an impact on presidential elections forecasting, w…
Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election: A Challenge for the Fiscal Model
In 2004, for the first time the fiscal model was employed for the purpose of real-time, ex ante forecasting of a presidential election. The results were encouraging (Cuzán and Bundrick 2005). This year, however, the model encounters a set of challenging conditions, relevant only to it, never seen in the data before. In this paper, we briefly summarize the model, describe the problem, wrestle with ways to address it, and conclude with a forecast f…
Deconstructing the 2004 Presidential Election Forecasts: The Fiscal Model and the Campbell Collection Compared
In this paper we compare the August 1st forecast of the 2004 presidential election generated with the fiscal model with those made with the seven models of what we call the “Campbell Collection,” after James E. Campbell, the editor or co-editor of several forecasting symposia that have appeared in the American Politics Quarterly (October, 1996) and in successive issues of PS: Political Science and Politics (October, 2004 and January, 2005). For r…
Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections: Update and Extension
This article updates, deepens, and extends previous articles published in this journal on the relation between fiscal policy and presidential elections. It presents evidence that is consistent with the view that voters reward fiscal frugality and punish fiscal expansion. The relationship is robust with respect to economic conditions, presidential incumbency, number of consecutive terms in the White House by presidents of the same party, and war. …
Presidential Popularity in Central America: Parallels with the United States
Presidential Popularity in Central America: Parallels with the United States
This article builds on our previous work, which showed that presiden tial popularity in Costa Rica is responsive to economic conditions. Here the analysis covers, in addition to Costa Rica, four sister republics which only recently have undergone democratization. We find that, as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America rises and falls with the state of the economy Also as in the United States, presidential popularity in C…
Presidential Popularity in Central America: Parallels with the United States
This article builds on our previous work, which showed that presiden tial popularity in Costa Rica is responsive to economic conditions. Here the analysis covers, in addition to Costa Rica, four sister republics which only recently have undergone democratization. We find that, as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America rises and falls with the state of the economy Also as in the United States, presidential popularity in C…
Five Laws of Politics
Drawing on more than 500 elections from around the world, this article presents five empirical laws of politics. Four of these laws span democracies and dictatorships, and one sets a boundary between the two. In both regimes the governing party or coalition represents a minority of the electorate. In democracies this minority usually represents a plurality that amounts to about one third of the electorate. Judging by the outcome of the first free…
The first two laws of politics: Nannestad and Paldam’s “Cost of Ruling” revisited
A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Predicting Presidential Elections with Equally Weighted Regressors in Fair's Equation and the Fiscal Model
Three-decade-old research suggests that although regression coefficients obtained with ordinary least squares (OLS) are optimal for fitting a model to a sample, unless the N over which the model was estimated is large, they are generally not very much superior and frequently inferior to equal weights or unit weights for making predictions in a validating sample. Yet, that research has yet to make an impact on presidential elections forecasting, w…
Resource Mobilization and Political Opportunity in the Nicaraguan Revolution: The Theory
A resource mobilization political opportunities paradigm of revolution in the Third World yields the hypotheses; Sufficient poverty, corruption, and social, economic, and political inequalities, grievances and discontent are assumed to exist in most Third World autocracies to legitimate violent revolution. Yet, revolution is rare, having more to do with resources, organization, strategy, and opportunities than with generalized discontent. The fol…
A cruise-and-crash model of the cost of ruling
Since the publication of Nannestad and Paldam ([1999]. “The Cost of Ruling. A Foundation Stone for Two Theories,” University of Aarhus, Denmark. Working Paper No. 1999-9. http://www.martin.paldam.dk/Papers/Gamle/Cost-of-ruling.PDF.) on the cost of ruling, their finding that incumbents lose votes in the order of 2 to 3 percentage points per term has gained the status of something like an “inductive law” of politics (Budge [2019]. Politics. A Unifi…
Five Laws of Politics: A Follow-Up
In this follow-up to “Five Laws of Politics,” I show that the original estimates of electoral outcomes describing the five “laws” hold up with twice the number of elections and three times as many countries as in the original article. The analysis yields long-run equilibrium values for several electoral parameters that set limits to incumbent support in a democracy. The evidence lends additional support to the notion that elections in democracies…
Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote
We review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts’ judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly …
Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010
Historically, statistical models for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006). However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007). One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914 (only the second time that …
Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election: A Challenge for the Fiscal Model
In 2004, for the first time the fiscal model was employed for the purpose of real-time, ex ante forecasting of a presidential election. The results were encouraging (Cuzán and Bundrick 2005). This year, however, the model encounters a set of challenging conditions, relevant only to it, never seen in the data before. In this paper, we briefly summarize the model, describe the problem, wrestle with ways to address it, and conclude with a forecast f…
Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections, 1880-1992
Fiscal policy is both a contributor to and an effect of presidential electoral fortunes in the United States. An analysis of presidential election results between 1880 and 1992 shows that, except in periods of major war, an increase in the ratio of federal outlays to GNP has a negative effect on presidential reelection independent of inflation or growth rate. Yet even though faced with voters who punish expansion and reward cutbacks, presidents d…
A Geometric Model of Elections in Five Federal Democracies
In an analysis of 1,825 state or provincial election outcomes in five federal democracies the rate of decay of incumbency ( K ) serves to partition the distribution of the vote for the incumbent party, the party of the head of government, between those who win a subsequent term and those who do not. In conjunction with the mean and standard deviation of the distribution, the weighted mean of the vote in re-election and defeat is identified. The m…
Forecasting the 2012 Presidential Election with the Fiscal Model
In March 2009, at a time when President Obama was basking in the glow of the honeymoon with the public every new president enjoys, I asked, “Will Barack Obama be a one-term president?” What prompted me to pose so impertinent a question at so hopeful a time was that the Office of Management and Budget was projecting that that year the federal government would spend 28% of gross domestic product (GDP). This amounted to a 7% point increase compared …
Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections: Update and Extension
This article updates, deepens, and extends previous articles published in this journal on the relation between fiscal policy and presidential elections. It presents evidence that is consistent with the view that voters reward fiscal frugality and punish fiscal expansion. The relationship is robust with respect to economic conditions, presidential incumbency, number of consecutive terms in the White House by presidents of the same party, and war. …
Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in the Hierarchical State
The actions of government fall into two types: taxes (the taking of property) and expenditures (the awarding of gifts). Politicians profit as long as the value of resources raised from taxation exceeds the cost of expenditures. From their point of view, fiscal efficiency consists in maximizing the support obtained by spending and minimizing the opposition generated by taxing. This is accomplished by spending on well-organized groups and taxing th…
A Critique of Collectivist Water Resources Planning
The American Presidential Elections
A Critique of Collectivist Water Resources Planning
Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in Democracies and Dictatorships
The economic analysis of the power to tax and spend, or what Franz Oppenheimer called "the political means," is applied to democracies and to dictatorships. The constraints imposed by democracies and dictatorships on the "iron law of political redistribution" and the "law of hierarchical centralization" are examined. It is shown that the fiscal exploitation inherent in these two laws of political profit reaches its fullest potential in a dictator…
Political Profit: Taxing and Spending in the Hierarchical State
The actions of government fall into two types: taxes (the taking of property) and expenditures (the awarding of gifts). Politicians profit as long as the value of resources raised from taxation exceeds the cost of expenditures. From their point of view, fiscal efficiency consists in maximizing the support obtained by spending and minimizing the opposition generated by taxing. This is accomplished by spending on well-organized groups and taxing th…
A Micro-Political Explanation of the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution
This paper presents a tentative explanation of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution using a "micro-political" model of political profit, governmental efficiency, and political stability applied to data on the history of Somoza's fall. The revolution is explained as the outcome of a loss of stability by a government that attempted to control a greater share of the resources of the nation than its capabilities to persuade and coerce the population would …
Latin America's Complex Politics: Busey's Guide Helps Specialists and Students Keep Track of Changes and Events in 21 Areas
Resource Mobilization and Political Opportunity in the Nicaraguan Revolution: The Theory
A resource mobilization political opportunities paradigm of revolution in the Third World yields the hypotheses; Sufficient poverty, corruption, and social, economic, and political inequalities, grievances and discontent are assumed to exist in most Third World autocracies to legitimate violent revolution. Yet, revolution is rare, having more to do with resources, organization, strategy, and opportunities than with generalized discontent. The fol…
The Rise and Fall of violence Theories
The Latin American studies association vs. the United States: The verdict of history
The collapse of the Soviet Union has been accompanied by critical commentaries on what are called sins of Sovietology. Critics have focused not so much on the failure of specialists to predict the breakup of the empire that Stalin built as on their alleged inability to understand the very nature of communist regimes.[1] By the same token, Nicaragua's repudiation of the Sandinistas in the 1990 election and the approaching demise of Fidel Castro's …
Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections, 1880-1992
Fiscal policy is both a contributor to and an effect of presidential electoral fortunes in the United States. An analysis of presidential election results between 1880 and 1992 shows that, except in periods of major war, an increase in the ratio of federal outlays to GNP has a negative effect on presidential reelection independent of inflation or growth rate. Yet even though faced with voters who punish expansion and reward cutbacks, presidents d…
Presidential Popularity in Central America: Parallels with the United States
Presidential Popularity in Central America: Parallels with the United States
This article builds on our previous work, which showed that presiden tial popularity in Costa Rica is responsive to economic conditions. Here the analysis covers, in addition to Costa Rica, four sister republics which only recently have undergone democratization. We find that, as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America rises and falls with the state of the economy Also as in the United States, presidential popularity in C…
Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections: Update and Extension
This article updates, deepens, and extends previous articles published in this journal on the relation between fiscal policy and presidential elections. It presents evidence that is consistent with the view that voters reward fiscal frugality and punish fiscal expansion. The relationship is robust with respect to economic conditions, presidential incumbency, number of consecutive terms in the White House by presidents of the same party, and war. …
Deconstructing the 2004 Presidential Election Forecasts: The Fiscal Model and the Campbell Collection Compared
In this paper we compare the August 1st forecast of the 2004 presidential election generated with the fiscal model with those made with the seven models of what we call the “Campbell Collection,” after James E. Campbell, the editor or co-editor of several forecasting symposia that have appeared in the American Politics Quarterly (October, 1996) and in successive issues of PS: Political Science and Politics (October, 2004 and January, 2005). For r…
Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election: A Challenge for the Fiscal Model
In 2004, for the first time the fiscal model was employed for the purpose of real-time, ex ante forecasting of a presidential election. The results were encouraging (Cuzán and Bundrick 2005). This year, however, the model encounters a set of challenging conditions, relevant only to it, never seen in the data before. In this paper, we briefly summarize the model, describe the problem, wrestle with ways to address it, and conclude with a forecast f…
Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election With the Fiscal Model: The Challenge Met
The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models. The presidential election forecast made with the Fiscal Model three months before Election Day put the incumbents' share of the two-party vote (VOTE2) at 48% (Cuzán and Bundrick 2008). As of the time of this writing, it appears the incumbent-par…
Predicting Presidential Elections with Equally Weighted Regressors in Fair's Equation and the Fiscal Model
Three-decade-old research suggests that although regression coefficients obtained with ordinary least squares (OLS) are optimal for fitting a model to a sample, unless the N over which the model was estimated is large, they are generally not very much superior and frequently inferior to equal weights or unit weights for making predictions in a validating sample. Yet, that research has yet to make an impact on presidential elections forecasting, w…
Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010
Historically, statistical models for forecasting the outcome of midterm elections to the United States House of Representatives have not been particularly successful (Jones and Cuzán 2006). However, in what may have been a breakthrough, most models correctly predicted that the Democrats would re-emerge as the majority party in 2006 (Cuzán 2007). One successful model was estimated using 46 elections, beginning with 1914 (only the second time that …
Postmortems of the 2010 Midterm Election Forecasts: A Post-Mortem on “Will the Republicans Retake the House in 2010?”
A bare-bones, “economic performance” model of the number of seats won by the president's party in U.S. House of Representatives elections, estimated over the 1914–2008 period, yielded a point forecast of 227 seats for the Democrats, a net loss of 30 seats relative to what the party held at the start of the 111th Congress (if estimated with midterm elections only; 27 seats, if estimated with all elections). However, there was a great deal of uncer…
Forecasting the 2012 Presidential Election with the Fiscal Model
In March 2009, at a time when President Obama was basking in the glow of the honeymoon with the public every new president enjoys, I asked, “Will Barack Obama be a one-term president?” What prompted me to pose so impertinent a question at so hopeful a time was that the Office of Management and Budget was projecting that that year the federal government would spend 28% of gross domestic product (GDP). This amounted to a 7% point increase compared …
Fiscal Model Failure: A Measurement Problem? A Preliminary Assessment
The Fiscal Model of presidential elections not only failed to predict that President Obama would win reelection handily, but the error incurred in the forecast of the incumbent share of the two-party vote was such (46.9% vs . 51.8% or more) as to warrant a rating of “inaccurate” or “quite inaccurate” in Campbell's table of benchmarks for evaluating forecasts (Campbell 2012, 611). This recap is a preliminary assessment of what went wrong
Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote
We review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts’ judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly …
Five Laws of Politics
Drawing on more than 500 elections from around the world, this article presents five empirical laws of politics. Four of these laws span democracies and dictatorships, and one sets a boundary between the two. In both regimes the governing party or coalition represents a minority of the electorate. In democracies this minority usually represents a plurality that amounts to about one third of the electorate. Judging by the outcome of the first free…
The PollyVote Forecast for the 2016 American Presidential Election
The PollyVote applies a century-old principle of combining different evidence-based methods for forecasting the outcome of American presidential elections. In this article, we discuss the principles followed in constructing the PollyVote formula, summarize its components, review the accuracy of its previous forecasts, and make a prediction for this year's presidential election
A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political science (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Politics (26 works) · Economics (22 works) · Law (15 works) · Presidential system (14 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (11 works)