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Objective: The study aims to demonstrate the utility of modeling compositional volatility in substantive domains beyond budgeting. Methods: We show how to model compositional volatility on its own or as a part of a system of equations in which the component parts of the compositional outcome variable are also modeled. Results: Using data on the volatility of support for German political parties, we demonstrate the usefulness of stand‐alone models of compositional volatility. Using data on the volatility of income shares in the United States, we demonstrate the usefulness of modeling volatility together with compositional components. Conclusion: There is considerable potential for modeling compositional volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We propose a simple approach to dealing with partial contestation in models of multiparty elections. Methods: Our proposed approach is to add a tiny value to the vote share of parties that do not contest a district and then to include dummy variables identifying those districts in which parties do not compete. We can then estimate a single system of equations using a seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) approach and Aitchison's log‐ratio transformation. In our SUR system, we interact the dummy variable for a party that partially contested districts with other predictors in the equation that uses the share of votes of the same party in the log‐ratio outcome. Finally, we estimate robust standard errors for predictors in this equation to address heteroscedasticity. Results: We demonstrate the utility of our approach using simulated data and election results from the English parliamentary elections in 2017. Conclusion: From our simulations, we find that our recommended approach performs as well as that proposed by Tom, Tucker, and Wittenberg. Our strategy is advantageous in that it is easy to estimate, uses information from all districts, and addresses partial contestation in real‐world elections with a single system of seemingly unrelated regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: We analyze how economic shocks affect the partisan nature of budgetary trade‐offs and use data from the U.S. Census Annual Survey of Government Finance to illustrate it. Methods: We propose a compositional approach to model trade‐offs among 10 budgetary categories across both time and space in U.S. states. Results: We find support for the notion that partisanship drives the allocation of budgetary expenditures. However, during times of negative economic shocks, either within a state or in neighboring states, Democratic and Republican governors have a similar budgetary response. Conclusions: The results show the effects of economic and political shifts, as well as the implications of spillovers from other states, on partisan decisions about trade‐offs in government budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study aims to test whether the American public is polarized and/or parallel in its assessments of the most important problem. Methods: We use compositional time series models and new data on public opinion to test for differences between subgroups. Results: We find inconsistent evidence of polarization for some issue areas but not others and remarkably robust evidence of parallel reactions across subgroups to economic and international shocks. Conclusion: The U.S. public is remarkably consistent in terms of its assessments of the most important problem and in how subgroups shift their perceptions of issue importance in reaction to changing circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monte Carlo simulations are commonly used to test the performance of estimators and models from rival methods, under a range of data-generating processes. This tool improves our understanding of the relative merits of rival methods in different contexts, such as varying sample sizes and violations of assumptions. When used, it is common to report the bias or the root mean squared error of the different methods. It is far less common to report the standard deviation, overconfidence, coverage probability, or power. Each of these six performance statistics provides important, and often differing, information regarding a method's performance. Here, we present a structured way to think about Monte Carlo performance statistics. In replications of three prominent papers, we demonstrate the utility of our approach and provide new substantive results about the performance of rival methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To develop and test theoretical expectations about when political parties will make more or fewer nativist appeals in their electoral campaigns. Methods: We use spatial autoregressive models to test our claims about the ways in which electoral competition drives nativist appeals. Results: We find strong support for our theoretical expectations on how spatial and temporal processes influence parties' nativist appeals. We also find strong support for our expectations on how the percentage of foreign‐born population shapes nativist appeals by government parties and how economic performance shapes nativist appeals by opposition parties. Conclusion: Spatial party competition conditions the relationship between economic performance, immigration, and parties' nativist appeals, revealing the strategic behavior of political parties in their choices of when to make nativist appeals more or less prominent in their electoral campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political decisions, constellations, and behaviors exert a large influence of the dynamics of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars‐CoV‐2) pandemic. Politics influences the choice of containment policies and the compliance with these policies—and therefore ultimately the epidemiological situation in each country, state, district, or even neighborhood. This introduction puts the articles collected in this special issue into the broader perspective of the social science literature on Covid‐19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To test for multicausality between government policy, health outcomes, economic performance, and citizen behavior during the COVID‐19 global pandemic. Methods: We perform Granger‐causality tests to explore the interrelationship between four endogenous variables, social distancing policy, home isolation, balance rate, and average weekly COVID‐19 deaths, in the 26 states of Brazil. As exogenous variables, we included a linear time trend and a dummy for the week in which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID‐19 a global pandemic. Results: Our analysis of Granger causal ordering between the four variables demonstrates that there is significant heterogeneity across the Brazilian federation. These findings can be interpreted as underscoring that there is no common model applicable to all states, and that the dynamics are context‐dependent. Conclusion: Our suggested approach allows researchers to account for the complex interrelationship between government policy, citizen behavior, the economy, and COVID‐related health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To demonstrate how a novel method enhances our understanding of determinants of inequality. Methods: We take advantage of recent advances in dynamic models of compositional dependent variables to simultaneously study tradeoffs across multiple slices of the composition of income in the United States between 1947 and 2014. Results: Our analyses demonstrate the utility of dynamic compositional models of income shares. Factors that increase the income share of the top income group often also increase the income share of the second income group and decrease the shares of lower groups at different rates. Polarization and marginal tax rates have large effects on relative income shares, while returns to labor, returns to capital, and partisan control of Congress have smaller, but statistically significant effects. Conclusion: Our suggested approach allows researchers to effectively explore interesting variation across multiple income groups in response to changes in determinants of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, political scientists have made extensive use of spatial econometric models to test a wide range of theories. In a review of spatial papers, we find that a majority of these studies use the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model. Although this is a powerful method that reveals inferences about diffusion processes, it is also highly restrictive and makes assumptions that often are not appropriate given the expressed theories. We contend that spatial-X (SLX) models are a better reflection of typical theories about spatial processes. Our simulations demonstrate that SLX models consistently retrieve the direct and indirect effects of covariates when the true data-generating process reflects other spatial processes. SAR models, however, tend to find phantom higher-order effects that are not present in the data. We further demonstrate how SLX models reveal heterogeneity in patterns of spatial dependence in countries' defense burdens that SAR models cannot discover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of spatial econometric models in political science has steadily risen in recent years. However, the interpretation of these models has generally ignored the important substantive, and even spatial, nature of the estimated effects. This leaves many papers with a (non-spatial) interpretation of coefficients on the covariates and a brief discussion of the sign and strength of the spatial parameter. We introduce a general approach to interpreting spatial models and provide several avenues for an exposition of substantive spatial effects. Our approach can be generalized to most models in the spatial econometric taxonomy. Building on the example of the diffusion of democracy, we elucidate how our approach can be applied to modern political science problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philips, Rutherford, and Whitten (2016, Stata Journal 16: 662–677) introduced dynsimpie, a command to examine dynamic compositional dependent variables. In this article, we present an update to dynsimpie and three new adofiles: cfbplot, effectsplot, and dynsimpiecoef. These updates greatly enhance the range of models that can be estimated and the ways in which model results can now be presented. The command dynsimpie has been updated so that users can obtain both prediction plots and change-from-baseline plots using postestimation commands. With the new command dynsimpiecoef, various types of coefficient plots can also be obtained. We illustrate these improvements using monthly data on support for political parties in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has been one of the biggest driving forces of the last half century. There has been substantial disagreement about the impact that increased international integration has on income inequality. Though most agree that globalization positively affects economic output, it is no surprise that it leads to relative winners and losers within nations. The question that remains is where in the income distribution are these relative gains and losses occurring? We offer a broader picture of globalization's effects on inequality by using a dynamic compositional approach to test the impact of globalization and relative factor endowments on the composition of income. Using data from four countries, we model the effects of globalization on quantiles of the income distribution. Our findings suggest that globalization has substantial (and divergent) effects across income strata, and that these effects differ across nations based on relative factor endowments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Scholars have noted the increase in nativist sentiment in political debates in both the United States and across Europe. However, how these changes have affected voting behavior and political party support is less clear. In this article, we ask how relevant nativist attitudes are when making voting decisions across party systems in the United States and Europe. Are these sentiments pushing out other drivers of vote choice, and if so, what are the ramifications for democratic governance? Method: We present hypotheses about the impact of nativist sentiments that follow logically from the theories on spatial models of politics and political economy models of politics. We use a series of multinomial logit models on survey data from Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States to estimate the impact of nativist sentiments on support for political parties in 2016. Results: We find support for all three of our hypotheses. Not surprisingly, there is a strong positive relationship between nativist sentiments and support for nativist parties. There is some variation, however, in terms of whether this increase in support for nativist parties comes at the expense of ideologically adjacent parties (as expected from spatial models of politics) or from parties of the left (as expected from political economy models of politics). Conclusions: Nativist sentiments were major drivers of support for political parties in 2016. Although more nativist sentiments drive voters in all cases examined toward nativist political parties, there is substantial variation across nations in terms of which parties lose support. The latter findings should be the focus of future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Nativism, or anti‐immigrant preferences, is increasingly evident within democratic mass publics. In this article, we explore whether economic concerns, perceptions of social decline, or some combination of the two shape these attitudes. Method: Our data are comprised of more than 8,000 survey respondents from nine Western, industrial democracies (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United States). Using mediation analysis, we test for the extent to which economic anxiety and perceptions of cultural decline exert direct and indirect effects on nativism. Results: On balance, the effect of economic anxiety—concern regarding job loss and negative economic assessments—on nativism is mostly indirect, affecting nativism by influencing perceptions of cultural decline. Conclusion: Given the strong association between perceptions of social decline and nativism, it appears as though anti‐immigrant sentiments draw from cultural rather than economic concerns. The story, however, does not end there. Perceptions of societal decline are strongly influenced by economic anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What affects government policy-making continues to be an important question for researchers interested in political competition and policy priorities. In this contribution, we bring together a theoretical framework that focuses on the influence of globalizing forces on government policy decisions with a methodological emphasis on explaining dynamic budgetary trade-offs. While comparative public policy and budgetary scholars typically have focused on entire budgets or amounts spent on specific policies, we look at the political priorities embedded in budgets by modeling the budget as a pie. Then, we theorize about how governments respond to external shocks by altering the allocations to the various policy areas. Using this approach, we find that governments of different ideological types react to external shocks by altering their different policy priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2013 Bundestag elections took place at a time when public opinion was strongly focused on a wide range of economic issues. But, given the coalition government and the complex array of policymakers whose hands were on the wheels of the German economy, some economic voting models would predict that the economy would play little role in deciding these elections. In this article, we use a mixture of aggregate and survey data to test what a range of different economic voting models predicted about the 2013 Bundestag elections and the extent to which these predictions were supported. The results from this exercise provide insights not only about the nature of the 2013 elections, but also about the applicability and adaptability of economic voting models to different political and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses several articles published within issue on topics including the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign; consequences of nativism; and political importance of nativism.

In this article, we adapt the modeling strategy proposed by Philips, Rutherford, and Whitten (2016, American Journal of Political Science 60: 268-283) and create a user-friendly Stata command, dynsimpie. This command requires the installation of the clarify package of Tomz, Wittenberg, and King (2003, Journal of Statistical Software 8(1): 1-30) and uses the commands in the clarify package to produce estimates from models of compositional dependent variables over time. Users can also examine how counterfactual shocks play through the system with graphs that are easy to interpret. We illustrate this with a model of voter support for the three dominant political parties in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on budgeting has taken various theoretical and methodological approaches, and these differences have prevented scholars using these various approaches from discussing their common topic. In this collection, we have gathered a group of prominent scholars to explore the intermingling of budgets and politics from an assortment of theoretical and methodological perspectives. This culminated in a collection that highlights not only the breadth of current research but also the range of what remains underexplored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]