Election daze
Andrew Gelman et al.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Spring 2016, Pages 103-130
Abstract:
Most surveys conducted during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign showed large swings in support for the Democratic and Republican candidates, especially before and after the first presidential debate. Using a combination of traditional cross-sectional surveys, a unique panel survey (in terms of scale, frequency, and source), and a high response rate panel, we find that daily sample composition varied more in response to campaign events than did vote intentions. Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is used to correct for this selection bias. Demographic post-stratification, similar to that used in most academic and media polls, is inadequate, but the addition of attitudinal variables (party identification, ideological self-placement, and past vote) appears to make selection ignorable in our data. We conclude that vote swings in 2012 were mostly sample artifacts and that real swings were quite small. While this account is at odds with most contemporaneous analyses, it better corresponds with our understanding of partisan polarization in modern American politics.
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Political Quid Pro Quo and the Impact of Perceptions of Corruption on Democratic Behavior
Kristin Kelly
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since its 1976 ruling in Buckley v. Valeo, the U.S. Supreme Court has voiced concern with corruption and the appearance of corruption stemming from political quid pro quo arrangements-particularly the deleterious consequences either could have on citizens' democratic behavior. Given the vagueness in the Court's definition of the “appearance of corruption,” campaign finance cases since Buckley have relied on survey data to measure perceptions of corruption. These data indicate high levels of perceived governmental corruption among the public but are silent on the question of whether these perceptions influence behavior. This study investigates the actual impact that perceptions of corruption have on individuals' levels of political participation. Adapting the socioeconomic status model developed most fully by Verba and Nie (1972), I estimate extended beta-binomial regressions using maximum likelihood techniques on data from the 2009 University of Texas Money in Politics survey and the 2012 American National Election Studies Time Series survey. The results indicate that individuals who perceive higher levels of corruption participate more in politics, on average, than those who perceive lower levels of corruption. This suggests that at least a few of the assumptions underlying the Court's rationale for upholding contribution limits in Buckley should be revisited, and that the Supreme Court's decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission may not negatively impact participation as suggested by critics.
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The Power of an Hour: Effects of Candidate Time Expenditure in State Legislative Elections
Michael Miller
Legislative Studies Quarterly, May 2016, Pages 327-359
Abstract:
Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during the 2008 election, I examine whether state house candidates who devote more time to their campaign win a larger share of the major-party vote. Consistent with previous work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and significant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers - but not incumbents - in incumbent-contested elections.
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Economic Performance and Presidential Trait Evaluations: A Longitudinal Analysis
Lisa Argyle et al.
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Presidential traits (i.e. morality, intelligence, leadership) have generally been assumed to be idiosyncratic personal characteristics of the individual and are treated as exogenous from other political and economic factors. Prior literature has shown that presidential characteristics and economic performance are important elements of vote choice and approval. Using ANES data from 1984-2008, we demonstrate an important link between these factors, showing that objective and subjective indicators of economic performance are significant predictors of trait evaluations. Specifically, evaluations of the incumbent president at election time are directly related to changes in economic performance earlier in the year. The effects of economic performance are not isolated to retrospective policy evaluations, but also influence the overall evaluation of the president as a person.
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Conditioned by Race: How Race and Religion Intersect to Affect Candidate Evaluations
Bryan McLaughlin & Bailey Thompson
Politics and Religion, forthcoming
Abstract:
While it is becoming increasingly clear that religious cues influence voter evaluations in the United States, work examining religious cues has largely overlooked the conditioning role of race. We employed a 2 × 2 (White candidate vs. Black candidate) × (racial cues vs. no racial cues) online experiment with a national sample (N = 397; 56% white, 46% black) where participants were exposed to a fictitious congressional candidate's webpage. Results show that White participants expected the religious candidate to be more conservative, regardless of race, while Black participants did not perceive a difference in ideology between the religious and non-religious Black candidates. Additionally, when it comes to candidate favorability, religious cues matter more to White participants, while racial cues are most important to Black participants. These findings provide evidence that religious and racial cues activate different assumptions among White and Black citizens.
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Time Discounting in Political Behavior: Delayed Gratification Predicts Turnout and Donations
Jerome Pablo Schafer
Yale Working Paper, March 2016
Abstract:
Recent Get-out-the-Vote experiments suggest that political participation involves delayed gratification. The transaction costs of voting are immediate. Its expressive benefits, however, are realized after the election, when others ask. In this article, I draw on a vast literature in psychology and economics to propose a model and a measure of how voters discount future pay-offs. The ability to delay gratification moderates the effects of political stimuli with deferred rewards such as the social norm to vote and the instrumental benefits of donating to a campaign. Therefore, less patient individuals are less willing to participate in politics, and to pretend that they do. In the empirical analysis, I use multiple incentivized measures from a representative US panel (N=1,820). I demonstrate that monetary discount rates provide reliable elicitations of time preferences, and show that they predict self-reported turnout and donor status. I suspend alternative explanations focusing on resources and risk.
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Karin Kitchens & Michele Swers
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that fundraising is not an impediment to women candidates because women raise just as much money as men after accounting for seat status. However, previous research focuses solely on general election candidates. By examining both primary and general election candidates, we find both gender and partisan differences in fundraising. While incumbency, competitiveness, and candidate quality predict fundraising in the general election, we show that Democratic women raise more money than their male counterparts in the primary election. However, Republican women do not enjoy greater fundraising success compared with their male counterparts, and in limited cases, being a Republican woman can be an obstacle to fundraising in the primary election.
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Coethnic Endorsements, Out-Group Candidate Preferences, and Perceptions in Local Elections
Andrea Benjamin
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Black and Latino voters support coethnic candidates at high rates in local elections. What is less clear is how Black and Latino voters respond to out-group candidates when they do not have the option to support a coethnic candidate. I posit that when race and ethnicity become salient in a campaign, endorsements from Black and Latino leaders and organizations increase support of out-group candidates among Blacks and Latinos. I find that this hypothesis is strongly supported among Blacks. However, the same is not true for Latinos, most likely because of the political heterogeneity of the group. Using data from a survey experiment, I show that Black endorsements of minority out-group candidates are persuasive for Blacks, while comparable endorsements from Latinos are not as influential among Latinos.
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The Dynamic Election: Patterns of Early Voting Across Time, State, Party, and Age
Ashok Vivekinan et al.
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The nature of turnout has changed in the United States: a shift in state policies has transformed a singular Election Day into a multi-week voting period. During the 2012 election, we assembled daily snapshots of early voting records across the U.S. We observe where and when individuals with key demographic characteristics voted. By measuring the timing of voting by demographic subgroups within small geographic areas, we assess how the early voting period may differentially affect various politically relevant subsets of the electorate. We find that partisans and older voters disproportionately take advantage of early voting, and that political independents and younger individuals who vote early do so much later in the early-voting window. We discuss policy implications, and we also conduct an exploratory analysis of the relationship between early vote timing and campaign events.
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Potential follow-up increases private contributions to public goods
Todd Rogers, John Ternovski & Erez Yoeli
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
People contribute more to public goods when their contributions are made more observable to others. We report an intervention that subtly increases the observability of public goods contributions when people are solicited privately and impersonally (e.g., mail, email, social media). This intervention is tested in a large-scale field experiment (n = 770,946) in which people are encouraged to vote through get-out-the-vote letters. We vary whether the letters include the message, “We may call you after the election to ask about your voting experience.” Increasing the perceived observability of whether people vote by including that message increased the impact of the get-out-the-vote letters by more than the entire effect of a typical get-out-the-vote letter. This technique for increasing perceived observability can be replicated whenever public goods solicitations are made in private.
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Electoral Competition and Gender Differences in Political Careers
Olle Folke & Johanna Rickne
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Spring 2016, Pages 59-102
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the role of competition between political parties for the promotion and turnover of social minorities in party organizations. We collect extensive and reliable panel data for the career trajectories of all Swedish politicians in 290 municipal councils over 20 years (N=35,000). We argue that political competition pushes local parties to promote the best individual, which in turn improves gender equality at the top. This finds strong support in the empirical analysis. Heightened competition is associated with smaller gender gaps in re-election, retention on the electoral ballot, and promotions to top positions. An extended analysis shows that variation in the qualifications and family structures of male and female politicians cannot account for these results. As a more plausible mechanism, the analysis suggests that parties have nomination processes that are less centralized and more focused on competence as a selection criteria when competition is fierce.
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Complex Contagion of Campaign Donations
Vincent Traag
PLoS ONE, April 2016
Abstract:
Money is central in US politics, and most campaign contributions stem from a tiny, wealthy elite. Like other political acts, campaign donations are known to be socially contagious. We study how campaign donations diffuse through a network of more than 50000 elites and examine how connectivity among previous donors reinforces contagion. We find that the diffusion of donations is driven by independent reinforcement contagion: people are more likely to donate when exposed to donors from different social groups than when they are exposed to equally many donors from the same group. Counter-intuitively, being exposed to one side may increase donations to the other side. Although the effect is weak, simultaneous cross-cutting exposure makes donation somewhat less likely. Finally, the independence of donors in the beginning of a campaign predicts the amount of money that is raised throughout a campaign. We theorize that people infer population-wide estimates from their local observations, with elites assessing the viability of candidates, possibly opposing candidates in response to local support. Our findings suggest that theories of complex contagions need refinement and that political campaigns should target multiple communities.
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Ballot Position, Choice Fatigue, and Voter Behaviour
Ned Augenblick & Scott Nicholson
Review of Economic Studies, April 2016, Pages 460-480
Abstract:
In this article, we examine the effect of “choice fatigue” on decision making. We exploit a natural experiment in which voters face the same contest at different ballot positions due to differences in the number of local issues on their ballot. Facing more decisions before a given contest significantly increases the tendency to abstain or rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first-listed candidate. We estimate that, without choice fatigue, abstentions would decrease by 8%, and 6% of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed.
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Get Out the (Costly) Vote: Institutional Design for Greater Participation
Dino Gerardi et al.
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing turnout: abstention penalties (used in 32 countries) and lotteries rewarding one randomly chosen participant (as proposed on the 2006 Arizona ballot). We analyze a benchmark model in which voters vary in their information quality and participation is costly. We illustrate that both institutions can improve collective outcomes, though lotteries are a more effective instrument asymptotically. Experimentally, we provide strong evidence for selective participation: lab voters participate more when better informed or when institutionally induced. Lotteries fare better than fines, suggesting that they may be a useful alternative to commonly used compulsory voting schemes.
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From Posting to Voting: The Effects of Political Competition on Online Political Engagement
Jaime Settle et al.
Political Science Research and Methods, May 2016, Pages 361-378
Abstract:
How does living in a battleground state during a presidential election affect an individual’s political engagement? We utilize a unique collection of 113 million Facebook status updates to compare users’ political discussion during the 2008 election. “Battleground” state users are significantly more likely to discuss politics in the campaign season than are users in uncompetitive “blackout” states. Posting a political status update - a form of day-to-day engagement with politics - mediates ∼20 percent of the relationship between exposure to political competition and self-reported voter turnout. This paper is among the first to use a massive quantity of social media data to explain the microfoundations of how people think, feel, and act on a daily basis in response to their political environment.
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Compulsory Voting and Dissatisfaction with Democracy
Shane Singh
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Compulsory voting is often linked to pro-democracy orientations in the public. However, there is reason to question the strength and universality of this link. Engaging research on the effects of coercion and punishment, this article argues that forced participation inflates the tendency of those with negative orientations towards democracy to see the democratic system as illegitimate, and to be dissatisfied with democracy. The study finds support for these expectations in analyses of three separate cross-national surveys and a natural experiment. Compulsory voting heightens dissatisfaction with democracy within key segments of the population.
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Can Credit Rating Agencies Affect Election Outcomes?
Igor Cunha, Miguel Ferreira & Rui Silva
London Business School Working Paper, March 2016
Abstract:
We show that credit rating agencies can have a significant effect on election outcomes in the United States. Specifically, we find that incumbent politicians receive significantly more votes in upgraded municipalities relative to non-upgraded municipalities. This incumbent effect is due to an expansion of local governments’ debt capacity that allows them to increase spending. The effects are stronger among democratic incumbents. We identify these effects by exploiting the exogenous variation in municipal bond ratings due to Moody’s recalibration of its scale in 2010.
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Compulsory Voting Can Increase Political Inequality: Evidence from Brazil
Gabriel Cepaluni & Daniel Hidalgo
Political Analysis, Spring 2016, Pages 273-280
Abstract:
One of the most robust findings on political institutions is that compulsory voting (CV) reduces the participation gap between poorer and wealthier voters. We present evidence that in Brazil, the largest country to use such a rule, CV increases inequality in turnout. We use individual-level data on 140 million Brazilian citizens and two age-based discontinuities to estimate the heterogeneous effects of CV by educational achievement, a strong proxy for socioeconomic status. Evidence from both thresholds shows that the causal effect of CV on turnout among the more educated is at least twice the size of the effect among those with less education. To explain this result, which is the opposite of what is predicted by the existing literature, we argue that nonmonetary penalties for abstention primarily affect middle- and upper-class voters and thus increase their turnout disproportionately. Survey evidence from a national sample provides evidence for the mechanism. Our results show that studies of CV should consider nonmonetary sanctions, as their effects can reverse standard predictions.