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How does regime type affect the poor? Are certain types of regimes better at translating economic growth into consumption for the world's least privileged citizens? We propose an alternative measure of transfers to the poor that is nearly universally available and innately captures distribution: average daily calorie consumption. In sharp contrast to the consumption of material goods or the accumulation of wealth for which humans have shown no upper bound on their ability to achieve, biological limits make it impossible for a small number of individuals to consume most of a nation's calories. Democracies and hybrid regimes—which combine elements of autocracy and democracy—are better at translating economic growth into total calorie consumption than autocracies and perform strikingly similarly in this regard; democracies outperform both hybrid regimes and autocracies, however, in converting growth into higher quality calories from animal sources.
Economic performance is a key component of most election forecasts. When fitting models, however, most forecasters unwittingly assume that the actual state of the economy, a state best estimated by the multiple periodic revisions to official macroeconomic statistics, drives voter behavior. The difference in macroeconomic estimates between revised and original data vintages can be substantial, commonly over 100% (two-fold) for economic growth estimates, making the choice of which data release to use important for the predictive validity of a model. We systematically compare the predictions of four forecasting models for numerous US presidential elections using real-time and vintage data. We find that newer data are not better data for election forecasting: forecasting error increases with data revisions. This result suggests that voter perceptions of economic growth are influenced more by media reports about the economy, which are based on initial economic estimates, than by the actual state of the economy.