Inside the Margins
Reversion to the Mean, or Their Version of the Dream? Latino Voting in an Age of Populism
Bernard Fraga, Yamil Velez & Emily West
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 2020, support for Joe Biden among Latina/o/x voters was 8 percentage points lower than support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, the largest drop of any racial/ethnic group. While much media and academic attention has focused on understanding the impact of misinformation, COVID-19 concerns, and racial animus on Latino voters in 2020, we take a step back and clarify the demographic and core ideological characteristics of Latino voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Using a mix of national survey data, precinct returns, and voter file records, we disaggregate components of electoral change. We find evidence of an increasing alignment between Latinos' ideology, issue positions, and vote choice. Correspondingly, we observe significant pro-Trump shifts among working-class Latinos and modest evidence of a pro-Trump shift among Latinos closer to the immigration experience. These findings, coupled with an analysis of the 2022 CES, point to a more durable Republican shift than currently assumed.
Divided by Income? Policy Preferences of the Rich and Poor Within the Democratic and Republican Parties
Michael Auslen & Justin Phillips
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research consistently demonstrates that differences between the policy preferences of high- and low-income individuals are surprisingly small, at least at the aggregate level. We depart from this work by considering the size of income-based differences in opinion within political parties. To do so, we use responses to 144 policy-specific questions in the 2010-2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES). Our effort demonstrates that differences in opinion among the rich and poor tend to be larger within the parties than in the overall population. Interestingly, these gaps are largest among Democrats. We find that these larger gaps persist even after accounting for the party's racial and ethnic diversity. Furthermore, among Democrats, class-based gaps in opinion are larger than the gaps we observe among other potential intraparty cleavages, such as age, gender, and religiosity. Our results suggest important implications for the growing literature on representational inequality.
Incrimination through innuendo: A replication and extension
Danielle Letourneau & Bertram Gawronski
Social Psychology, March 2024, Pages 51-61
Abstract:
Research by Wegner et al. (1981) suggests that incriminating innuendo in questions can negatively affect attitudes and opinions. Two preregistered studies (N = 506) provide a close replication of Study 1 of Wegner et al., additionally testing whether question-innuendo effects are moderated by partisanship. Replicating the original findings of Wegner et al., questions insinuating something negative about a target person reduced favorable impressions of the target. Counter to the novel hypotheses that effects of incriminating questions would be reduced for political-ingroup targets and enhanced for political-outgroup targets, question-innuendo effects did not differ across target groups. The findings suggest that merely asking a question about a false proposition can influence public opinion in the absence of incorrect assertions that could be deemed misinformation.
Misleading Polls in the Media: Does Survey Clickbait Have Social Consequences?
Matthew Graham, Sunshine Hillygus & Andrew Trexler
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In today's competitive information environment, clicks are the currency of the digital media landscape. Clickbait journalism attempts to entice attention with provocative and sensational headlines, but what are the implications when public opinion polls are the hook? Does the use of survey clickbait -- news stories that make misleading claims about public opinion -- have implications for perceptions of the public, journalists, or the polling industry? In two survey experiments conducted in the United States, we find that exposure to apolitical survey clickbait that makes exaggerated claims about the incompetence of the American public undermines perceptions of their capacity for democratic citizenship. At the same time, we find no evidence that this type of survey clickbait damages the reputations of the media or polling industry, suggesting that the media may have perverse incentives to use low-quality polls or to misrepresent polling results to drive traffic.
Campaign Finance Vouchers Do Not Expand the Diversity of Donors: Evidence from Seattle
Chenoa Yorgason
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Donating to a campaign is inherently costly, and as a result the composition of campaign donors differs from the composition of the electorate. What happens when the financial barriers to campaign finance participation are removed? This paper analyzes Seattle's recent campaign finance reform, where all registered voters receive four $25 vouchers to donate to candidates abiding by stricter campaign finance restrictions. Utilizing individual- and census block group-level data combined with administrative donation records, I find that those most mobilized by the availability of vouchers belong to groups already overrepresented within the donor pool. This finding is significant across race, income, past political participation, age, and partisanship. In some cases, the availability of vouchers appears to pull the donor pool further from parity with the larger electorate.
Skin Tone and the Moderating Effect of Partisanship on Assessments of Elected Officials of Color
Christopher Stout et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explore whether the effects of colorism on evaluations of politicians is moderated by shared partisanship. We hypothesize that colorism will lead Whites to rate darker elected officials of color more poorly. Additionally, we hypothesize that partisanship will moderate this relationship with Whites being less likely to engage in colorism when evaluating co-partisans. We test our hypotheses using a crowd-sourced measure of skin tone based on the Massey-Martin index and the 2016, 2018, and 2020 Congressional Election Studies. We find that darker-skinned elected officials of color from a different party receive less support among Whites. In contrast, we find that skin tone does not influence support for co-partisan elected officials of color. Additional analysis demonstrates that the effect of colorism on evaluation of out-group partisans is strongest for Whites who score high on a racial conservatism measure.
Out-Of-State Donors and Legislative Surrogacy in the U.S. Senate
Alex Keena
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies show that the extraordinary growth in campaign expenditures is fueled by a small, elite subset of the donor population that gives generously to candidates across the country. It is often assumed that the wealthy influence policy outcomes through such gifts to politicians; however, the representational benefits of giving to politicians out-of-state are unclear. What do donors gain legislatively when they give to legislators living out-of-state? I study the campaign financing of US senators over three decades (1989-2018) and find that senators receive the most money from out-of-state donors when they face reelection and risk losing. In this context, donors invest in the collective benefits of party representation when they give money to out-of-state senators. However, when giving to senators "off cycle," out-of-state donors behave as "consumers" who reward senators for the positions they have taken. Each bill sponsored by a senator when they are not up for reelection leads to a corresponding increase of about 1% in receipts from out-of-state donors. These results offer a more complete view of the legislative surrogacy that the wealthy receive when they give to politicians out-of-state and suggest possible links between campaign contributions and public policy outcomes.
Does Brown beat Biesiada? Name fluency and electoral success
Jacob Harris
Electoral Studies, April 2024
Abstract:
Of the myriad cues voters rely on to evaluate political candidates, only one cue is available to all voters in all candidate-based elections -- the candidates' names. Drawing upon multiple decades of election data in local and congressional elections in the United States, I examine the relationship between the processing fluency (pronounceability and commonality) of political candidates' names and vote share. I observe a strong, positive relationship for name pronounceability and more ambiguous results for name commonality. A one-standard deviation increase in pronounceability is associated with an increased vote share of 0.8 percentage points in congressional general elections, 1.4 percentage points in congressional primary elections, and 0.29 percentage points in local elections. Despite some sensitivity to how fluency is conceptualized, these findings suggest that the phonological characteristics of candidates' names are consequential heuristics that voters use to evaluate candidates. Future research should seek to unpack the causal processes underlying these results by disentangling the racial and ethnic cues embedded in names.
Rain, rain, voter go away? New evidence on rainfall and voter turnout from the universe of North Carolina voters during the 2012-2020 presidential elections
Nick Turner
Political Geography, April 2024
Abstract:
I revisit the relationship between inclement weather and voter turnout using the universe of voters in N.C. during the last three U.S. presidential elections. While I find that rainfall continues to slightly dampen turnout overall, the results suggest that the negative effects on in-person election day voting are partially offset by increased use of alternate voting methods. Intuitively, these methods, including mail voting and early/absentee voting, allow voters to cast their ballots while avoiding the costs of heading to the polling place in bad weather. Further, I find that many voters respond to rainfall by adopting these voting methods so that the likelihood of voting increases on net in the subsequent election.
Democratization in the USA? The Impact of Antebellum Suffrage Qualifications on Politics and Policy
David Bateman
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Did the first wave of democratization in America -- the removal of property and taxpaying qualifications for white men -- change politics and policy? This paper leverages unique state-level institutional features to empirically identify the impact of reform on enfranchisement rates, turnout, patterns of representation, and policy outcomes. These are then used as a baseline calibration for national analyses. I draw extensively on a uniquely comprehensive dataset of suffrage qualifications and on newly collected and currently underused data on state electoral results and legislative behavior. I find that there was a sizeable body of adult free men disenfranchised by restrictive property qualifications, the abolition of which had a significant effect on turnout. The impact on patterns of representation and policy outcomes was more modest, and often cannot be distinguished from no effect. The most likely explanation is that parties were able to adapt to suffrage reform without changing policy positions.