GraVandius
Retired Troll
- Pronouns
- His Majesty
Do Uncontested Elections Have Worse Outcomes?
Following the debacles that lead to Rach's resignation for President the idea came into my mind that the region is more critical of candidates who win in uncontested elections than those with opponents. The easiest position to test this idea with was the most prominent, the presidency. I had already started another study on the Presidency, in which I documented all the Presidential elections I could find in the Oval Room (Stored in the very cool ERI Data Bank). Following that, I contacted HEM about getting access to the raw data from his excellent What Does It Mean To Be A 'Popular' President, And Who Are The Popular Ones? piece in the ENN. HEM was kind enough to grant the access and after about two weeks of work, here are the results.
This graph compares the average Approval ratings of the nine totally uncontested (Candidate vs Abstain or ROE) Presidential elections from what I believe was the first one in July 2007 to Rach in the most recent election, to the total average from the aforementioned ENN piece. As you can see the average for totally uncontested elections, is significantly lower than the total average with a difference of 8.29%. This would also notably put the Uncontested average in the unpopular range of HEM's study as it is just slightly below the 58.25% that marked the bottom quartile of his data.
This would seem to suggest that the region is in fact more critical of the winners of uncontested elections. There is another option for this result however. The group contains some of the notable low polling performers Pez201 and Aexnidaral according to HEM's study, ranking last and 5th from last respectively. Since one could assume bad polling means a bad term the other option could be that there is simply some correlation between bad presidential terms and uncontested elections. This correlation could exist perhaps due to a lack of an opposition on ones behind, which could lead potentially to complacency.
Regardless of which of these two theories is true it seems that it might be better for cannidates in the upcoming Presidential Election to have an opponent rather than coast into a coronation.
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