Government parties no longer bounce back from midterm losses

Midterm elections, such as those due to be held in the United States on 6 November, are often used as a key measure of a government’s popularity. But there is a common perception that even if governing parties suffer poor results in midterms, they are likely to regain some support before subsequent national elections due to the ‘electoral cycle’ effect. Drawing on new research, Stefan Müller and Tom Louwerse illustrate that while this may have been true at one time, recent decades provide little evidence that governing parties will recover from early losses at the end of the electoral cycle.