Ballot Stuff
Deborah Jordan Brooks & Michael Murov
American Politics Research, May 2012, Pages 383-418
Abstract: Greatly increased advertising spending by independent groups represents one of the most dramatic recent changes in U.S. elections. This article moves forward our theoretical and empirical understanding of how the public responds to ads sponsored by candidates as compared to ads sponsored by unknown Super PACs and similar independent groups. In the theoretical section of the article, we establish why it is necessary to measure both backlash and ad persuasiveness to understand overall ad effectiveness and then we develop a series of hypotheses about the likely influence of ad sponsorship. In the empirical section, we undertake the first analysis to date of how the public responds to attack television ads sponsored by unknown independent groups. Using a large-N, geographically representative sample of U.S. adults, we conduct an experiment to assess how sponsorship influences ad effectiveness. We find that attack ads sponsored by unknown independent groups are more effective, on net, than ads sponsored by candidates.
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Daron Shaw & James Gimpel
Political Communication, Spring 2012, Pages 137-159
Abstract: Candidate appearances have long been a staple of American campaigns, yet we don't know much about what happens when elites meet the masses. In 2006, we conducted a statewide field experiment assessing the effectiveness of personal appearances by the incumbent governor. Republican Rick Perry's campaign appearances were randomly assigned to specific media markets for 3 days in January 2006, while we simultaneously collected public opinion, media coverage, contribution, and volunteer data. We find increased public support for Perry, but also increased support for his Democratic opponent. Contrary to some recent studies of TV advertising, appearance effects persisted for at least 1 week. The tone of news media coverage of the governor's appearances doesn't influence the mobilization of Perry voters, but less favorable stories might exacerbate countermobilization effects. Perry's appearances were more unambiguously effective in generating contributions and volunteers.
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Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment
Jonathan Woon
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract: Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward-looking but uncertain about politicians' unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.
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The Influence of Federal Spending on Presidential Elections
Douglas Kriner & Andrew Reeves
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract: Do voters reward presidents for increased federal spending in their local constituencies? Previous research on the electoral consequences of federal spending has focused almost exclusively on Congress, mostly with null results. However, in a county- and individual-level study of presidential elections from 1988 to 2008, we present evidence that voters reward incumbent presidents (or their party's nominee) for increased federal spending in their communities. This relationship is stronger in battleground states. Furthermore, we show that federal grants are an electoral currency whose value depends on both the clarity of partisan responsibility for its provision and the characteristics of the recipients. Presidents enjoy increased support from spending in counties represented by co-partisan members of Congress. At the individual level, we also find that ideology conditions the response of constituents to spending; liberal and moderate voters reward presidents for federal spending at higher levels than conservatives. Our results suggest that, although voters may claim to favor deficit reduction, presidents who deliver such benefits are rewarded at the ballot box.
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Distributive Politics and Voter Turnout
Tetsuya Matsubayashi & Jun-Deh Wu
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, Spring 2012, Pages 167-185
Abstract: Do distributive policies affect voter turnout? Drawing upon previous research on distributive politics and policy feedback, we hypothesize that more distributive federal grants increase the rate of voting. Our analysis using district-level data from 1993 to 2000 reveals that the larger amount and number of distributive federal grants allocated to congressional districts are associated with the higher percentages of voter turnout in the subsequent congressional elections. We address estimation problems that result from the reciprocal relationship between federal spending and voter turnout and of omitted variable bias by using an instrumental variable. Our findings imply that distributive policies advantage incumbent legislators partly because they are effective for mobilizing potential supporters.
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More Bang for the Buck: Campaign Spending and Fundraising Success
Corwin Smidt & Dino Christenson
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract: Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending's influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an equal or larger payoff than increases in a candidate's viability and find different types of spending are beneficial for frontrunner and long-shot candidates. The results consistently indicate greater early spending works to advantage candidates, suggesting a lack of initial resources is a significant obstacle for candidates who seek to financially benefit from their campaign's performance.
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Forecasting Elections from Voters' Perceptions of Candidates' Ability to Handle Issues
Andreas Graefe & Scott Armstrong
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract: When deciding for whom to vote, voters should select the candidate they expect to best handle issues, all other things equal. A simple heuristic predicted that the candidate who is rated more favorably on a larger number of issues would win the popular vote. This was correct for nine out of ten U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 2008. We then used simple linear regression to relate the incumbent's relative issue ratings to the actual two-party popular vote shares. The resulting model yielded out-of-sample forecasts that were competitive with those from the Iowa Electronic Markets and established quantitative models. The issue-index model has implications for political decision makers, as it can help to track campaigns and to decide which issues to focus on.
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The Impact of Negative Campaign Ads
Eric Marks, Mark Manning & Icek Ajzen
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, May 2012, Pages 1280-1292
Abstract: We compared negative and positive ads in the context of a fictitious election. Participants read a strong or weak message supporting one candidate (positive ad) or derogating the opposition candidate (negative ad). The strong positive message had a greater impact on attitudes toward the candidates than the weak positive message, but message strength had no significant effect for negative messages, suggesting that positive messages are centrally processed, and negative messages serve mainly as peripheral cues. Accordingly, a strong positive message was more effective than a weak positive message, but a weak positive message was less effective than a weak negative message. We conclude that negative political ads are advisable only when candidates cannot provide strong arguments to support their candidacy.
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Do Unions Still Matter in U.S. Elections? Assessing Labor's Political Power and Significance
Peter Francia
The Forum, May 2012
Abstract: Popular accounts of the labor movement often suggest that unions are in decline. While there have been sharp declines in union membership as a percentage of the workforce, this study presents evidence that organized labor's influence in the U.S. elections remains significant. Using data from the American National Election Study and the National Election Pool, the results in this study demonstrate: (1) union households, despite drops in union membership as a percentage of the workforce, have remained a sizeable percentage of the U.S electorate, especially in regions outside of the South; (2) unions boost voter turnout, including among those from traditionally underrepresented demographics; and (3) unions continue to produce a strong Democratic vote in presidential and congressional elections, and boost the Democratic vote among middle-income whites - a critical "swing" constituency. In total, these results suggest that the future strength or weakness of the labor movement is likely to have significant implications for upcoming election outcomes, the party coalitions that ultimately form for future Democratic and Republican candidates, and how representative the electorate will be relative to the population in years to come.
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Competition, Party Dollars, and Income Bias in Voter Turnout, 1980-2008
Amber Wichowsky
Journal of Politics, April 2012, Pages 446-459
Abstract: The conventional wisdom is that turnout is higher in competitive contests and that electorates are more representative when more people vote. But whether more competition produces a more representative electorate remains unclear. Using measures of income bias that improve measurement equivalence across states, I show that income biases in voting participation tend to shrink as the state's party system becomes more competitive and as the Democratic Party does more to mobilize voters. Close elections, however, do little to explain the income composition of the electorate. Rather, competition reflects a political struggle that varies in the extent to which it increases turnout among less advantaged citizens.
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Looking to the Future: Prospective Economic voting in 2008 presidential elections
Kristin Michelitch et al.
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract: Despite the economic turmoil of the time, a typical study of vote choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election would (falsely) find little evidence that voters' opinions about the future state of the economy affected their vote choice. We argue that this misleading conclusion results from serious measurement error in the standard prospective economic evaluations survey question. Relying instead on a revised question, included for the first time in the 2008 American National Election Study, we find that most respondents condition their prospective economic evaluations on potential election outcomes, and that these evaluations are an important determinant of vote choice. A replication in a very different political context - the 2008 Ghanaian election - yields similar results.
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Partisan Power Play: The Origins of Local Election Timing as an American Political Institution
Sarah Anzia
Studies in American Political Development, April 2012, Pages 24-49
Abstract: Eighty percent of American cities today hold their general elections on different days than state and national elections. It is an established fact that voter turnout in these off-cycle local elections is far lower than turnout in local elections held concurrently with state and national elections. In this paper, I demonstrate that the timing of city elections has been an important determinant of voter turnout since before the Civil War. By examining three large American cities over the course of the nineteenth century, I find that American political parties regularly manipulated the timing of city elections to secure an edge over their rivals. I show that the decisions to change the election dates of these cities were contentious, partisan, and motivated by an expectation of subsequent electoral gain. The Progressive municipal reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in this tradition when they separated city elections from state and national elections, and the local election schedule they implemented has largely persisted until today.
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The Top Two Primary: What Can California Learn from Washington?
Todd Donovan
California Journal of Politics and Policy, February 2012
Abstract: Washington's experience with primary elections provides an opportunity to assess issues associated with implementing the top two primary and an opportunity to examine how changing to a top two primary may affect elections and voting. Although the Washington context is different from California (top two replaced an open partisan primary in Washington, rather than a closed partisan primary), Washington's experience suggests the effects of this reform have been rather limited. There may have been a slight increase in turnout and a minor increase in campaign expenditure after changing to top two, but it is difficult to link these changes to the primary system. Whatever the cause of the changes, the partisan structure of Washington's legislature appears unaltered by the new primary system.
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Joshua Dyck & Annika Hagley
Politics & Policy, April 2012, Pages 195-220
Abstract: This article uses relatively novel techniques (geographic information systems, spatial regression) to provide counterevidence to the reasoning voter hypothesis in previous studies of direct democracy. We apply these methods to voting data in relation to the spatial implications of Proposition 83, a 2006 California ballot initiative that set residency restrictions upon felons convicted of sexual offenses to 2,000 feet beyond the boundaries of parks and schools. We apply a theoretical framework that argues that geographic/spatial awareness is often subject to affective responses. Our hypothesis suggests that, in the absence of clear costs/benefits and without explicit cues concerning the complexity of the spatial environment, voters' abilities to place self-interested votes become more susceptible to affect and symbols. Our models support this idea: partisan, ideological, and affective determinants dominate the model, while geographic self-interest is unrelated to voting behavior on Proposition 83.
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Campaign Context and Preference Dynamics in U.S. Presidential Elections
Costas Panagopoulos
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties, Spring 2012, Pages 123-137
Abstract: Previous scholarship finds that campaigns "matter" in that these enterprises have the capacity to influence voter preferences. Insights about how campaigns exert effects on preferences are less abundant, however. In this paper, we elaborate a theory of campaign effects that proposes campaigns matter, at least in part, because they function as a filter to mediate the impact of events. By amplifying and reinforcing the impact of relevant events, campaigns help voters process campaign developments, permitting citizens to form, crystallize or update candidate preferences. In quadrennial presidential contests, active campaigns are generally limited to battleground states, setting up natural experiments that allow scholars to investigate the claim that competitiveness influences campaign dynamics by generating vigorous campaigns that intensify the impact of events. We examine this hypothesis by comparing the dynamics of voter preferences for U.S. president in battleground and non-battleground states in the fall 2008 campaign using statewide survey data. The results confirm our hypothesis by showing that events exerted both short- and longer-term effects in battleground states, while any impact on voter sentiment in non-battleground states was short-lived.
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Measuring the Compactness of Political Districting Plans
Roland Fryer & Richard Holden
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2011, Pages 493-535
Abstract: We develop a measure of compactness based on the distance between voters within the same district relative to the minimum distance achievable, which we coin the relative proximity index. Any compactness measure that satisfies three desirable properties (anonymity of voters, efficient clustering, and invariance to scale, population density, and number of districts) ranks districting plans identically to our index. We then calculate the relative proximity index for the 106th Congress, which requires us to solve for each state's maximal compactness - a problem that is nondeterministic polynomial-time hard (NP hard). The correlations between our index and the commonly used measures of dispersion and perimeter are -.37 and -.29, respectively. We conclude by estimating seat-vote curves under maximally compact districts for several large states. The fraction of additional seats a party obtains when its average vote increases is significantly greater under maximally compact districting plans relative to the existing plans.
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Deliberative democracy and electoral competition
Patrick Hummel
Games and Economic Behavior, July 2012, Pages 646-667
Abstract: This paper introduces a model of electoral competition in which candidates select policies and voters are then exposed to arguments in favor of the policies. Voters update their beliefs about their own private preferences after listening to arguments and then vote in the election. I show that candidates adopt more divergent policies when voters are exposed to more arguments before the election.
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What Happens when a Candidate Doesn't Bark? "Cursed" Voters and Their Impact on Campaign Discourse
Kyle Mattes
Journal of Politics, April 2012, Pages 369-382
Abstract: Formal models of candidate and voter election behavior often assume that the voters are Bayesian learners who are able to draw inferences not only from the choices candidates make, but also from choices that the candidates did not make. Here, we introduce a formal model and experiment designed to test the extent of voter updating and how it affects campaign strategies. We find that voter behavior tends toward quite incomplete updating, which in turn leads candidates to increase their use of negative campaigning.
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Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in Primary Elections for the U.S. House
Jamie Carson et al.
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, June 2012, Pages 127-145
Abstract: Previous research has largely concluded that House elections have become less competitive in the modern era. Our research examines one area where we expect to observe more competition - namely, primary elections. In this article, we investigate when and where a state legislator will emerge to run in a congressional primary. All else equal, we expect that state legislators who can carry a large portion of their old state reelection constituency to the "geographic" congressional constituency will be more likely to emerge and receive a higher vote share in the election. Using geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, we are able to derive a measure of constituency congruency by focusing on the degree of intersection between state legislative and congressional districts. Our results indicate that state legislators are more likely to emerge in a primary if constituency congruency is high, especially in open seat contests. Congruency does not appear to provide an electoral advantage at the polls.
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Early Primaries, Viability and Changing Preferences for Presidential Candidates
Loren Collingwood, Matt Barreto & Todd Donovan
Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2012, Pages 231-255
Abstract: Given the fluid context of primaries and observed swings in national polls, many Democratic voters likely switched candidate support over the course of the 2008 primary campaign. We examine how perceptions of early caucus and primary outcomes subsequently affected voter choice and candidate momentum. Although the 2008 calendar left many voters with a brief window to assess candidates, it nonetheless allowed a non-front-runner to benefit from momentum and win the Democratic nomination. This article employs a panel study of voters surveyed at two time points during the nomination contest to assess individual-level change in candidate support. Results from the earlier states sent signals about candidate viability to people who had not yet voted. We find that voters deciding after results were in from early states changed their perceptions of candidate viability and that this changed whom they intended to support. We conclude that momentum remains an important factor in presidential nominations.
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The 2008 Media Primary: Handicapping the Candidates in Newspapers, on TV, Cable and the Internet
Todd Belt, Marion Just & Ann Crigler
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract: The press plays a crucial role early in the preprimary presidential campaign, determining which candidates appear viable to voters, contributors, and other media. This process necessarily benefits some candidates over others. We analyze how the press winnowed the candidate fields of both parties in the early 2008 preprimary campaign. We find coverage remarkably similar across a wide range of traditional and new media, including newspaper, radio, television, cable, legacy and web-native Internet news, and talk shows. The media ignored most candidates to concentrate on the Democratic contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama while paying less attention to the Republican race. Tone towards candidates was uniform except on partisan talk shows. The tone of Internet news was slightly more balanced than traditional outlets. Similar coverage across media results from journalistic preference for dramatic story lines, staffing constraints, and widespread speculation about candidate viability, which we describe as "handicapping the candidates."
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Sequential or Simultaneous Elections? A Welfare Analysis
Patrick Hummel & Brian Knight
NBER Working Paper, May 2012
Abstract: This paper addresses a key question on the design of electoral systems. Should all voters vote on the same day or should elections be staggered, with late voters observing early returns before making their decisions? Using a model of voting and social learning, we illustrate that sequential elections place too much weight on the preferences and information of early states but also provide late voters with valuable information. Under simultaneous elections, voters equally weigh the available information but place too much weight on their priors, providing an inappropriate advantage to front-runners. Given these trade-offs, simultaneous elections are welfare-preferred if the front-runner initially has a small advantage, but sequential elections are welfare-preferred if the front-runner initially has a large advantage. We then quantitatively evaluate this trade-off using data based on the 2004 presidential primary. The results suggest that simultaneous systems outperform sequential systems although the difference in welfare is relatively small.
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Left Parties, Poor Voters, and Electoral Participation in Advanced Industrial Societies
Christopher Anderson & Pablo Beramendi
Comparative Political Studies, June 2012, Pages 714-746
Abstract: Although income inequality is an important normative issue for students of democratic politics, little is known about its effects on citizens' electoral participation. The authors develop a formal model of the incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. It posits that countries' income distributions and competition on the left provide different incentives for left parties to mobilize lower income voters. In the absence of political competition, higher levels of income inequality reduce the incentives of dominant left parties to target lower income voters. However, competition on the left creates incentives for a dominant left party to mobilize lower income voters, thus counteracting the negative impact of inequality on parties' incentives to target them. As a consequence, the negative association between inequality and turnout at the aggregate level is muted by the presence of several parties on the left side of the political spectrum. Using aggregate data on elections in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1980 and 2002 and election surveys collected in the second wave of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project, the authors find strong and consistent support for their model.
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Voter Decisions on Eminent Domain and Police power Reforms
Kwami Adanu et al.
Journal of Housing Economics, forthcoming
Abstract: One unresolved issue arising from the use of eminent domain power involves how the perceived benefits and costs of eminent domain power affect people's positions on the reform of eminent domain and police power law. The paper addresses this issue by estimating a voting model that explains voters' decisions on eminent domain and police power reform referenda in the U.S. Estimates indicate that eminent domain referendum outcomes hinged on voters' fundamental values and ideology, and voters' immediate self-interest. Voters' fundamental values and ideology affects referendum outcomes insofar as educational attainment in a county has a statistically significant effect on support for reform. Despite the greater incidence of eminent domain in low income and poorer communities, success of reform referenda in this study was found to be greater in counties with higher incomes and lower unemployment rates. This implies that whatever asymmetry exists in the exercise of eminent domain law across income groups does not affect voter reaction to eminent domain reforms. Moreover, counties with high unemployment rates consider the larger potential benefits from urban renewal projects in vote decision-making providing a link between self-interest and voting behavior.