Legitimate Elections
Getting the Message: Opinion Polarization over Election Law
M.V. (Trey) Hood & Seth McKee
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article demonstrates with survey data a pronounced shift in opinion movement on a restrictive voting provision: requiring a driver's license number to vote absentee by mail as per Georgia Republican legislators' passage of Senate Bill (SB) 202 in March 2021. The dynamic we uncover is asymmetric, with no significant movement in the opinions of Republican voters. The substantial shift in views is confined to Democratic and Independent voters, who strongly turned against this restrictive requirement in the second survey conducted after enactment of SB 202. The rapid and pronounced movement of certain opinions on a restrictive voting measure shows how easily the mass electorate can alter their views to reflect polarization in a policy domain during a time of historic partisan divisions.
Populist voters like dark politicians
Alessandro Nai
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Who likes dark politicians? This article investigates whether voters showcasing populist attitudes are more likely to appreciate candidates that score high on dark personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and low on agreeableness. This intuition is tested on a large-scale, assessing how voters perceive the likeability of top candidates having competed in elections worldwide. The investigation leverages evidence from an international survey that includes expert-ratings for personality profile of 49 top candidates having competed in 22 national elections, matched with standardized survey data gathered in the aftermath of those same elections that include self-ratings of populist attitudes and candidate likeability (CSES data, N = 70,690). Even controlling for important covariates that drive candidate likeability (e.g., the ideological distance between the voter and the candidate), the results strongly confirm the expectations: populist voters are significantly more likely to appreciate candidates high on the Dark Triad and low on agreeableness. The effects, especially for (low) agreeableness, are quite substantial.
Party Elite Engagement and Coordination in House Primary Elections: A Test of Theories of Parties
Hans Hassell
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The support of party elites in the primary has a strong influence on who runs in a primary and how well they do. Yet party elites do not always engage or coordinate their efforts. Moreover, theories of parties disagree about whether and where party elites should engage and coordinate in primaries, depending on their view of the relative importance of electoral and policy goals. This article examines party elites' engagement and coordination in primary elections in the U.S. House between 2004 and 2018. Consistent with theories of parties as networks of policy demanders, party elites are engaged in primaries in both competitive and safe districts. But, while party elites coordinate their efforts in competitive districts, they are less likely to coordinate in safe districts. Their disparate coordination efforts reflect different electoral priorities in these districts.
COVID-19 and Asian Americans: How Elite Messaging and Social Exclusion Shape Partisan Attitudes
Nathan Kar Ming Chan, Jae Yeon Kim & Vivien Leung
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extending theories of social exclusion and elite messaging, we argue that Trump's targeted rhetoric toward Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic pushes the racial group, largely "Independent" or nonpartisan affiliated, to lean more towards the Democratic Party. We support this claim by combining social media (Study 1) and survey data (Study 2) analysis. Tracing 1.4 million tweets, we find that Trump's rhetoric has popularized racially charged coronavirus-related terms and that exclusionary, anti-Asian attitudes have increased in the United States since the pandemic began. Next, by analyzing repeated cross-sectional weekly surveys of Asian Americans from July 2019 to May 2020 (n=12,907), we find that the group has leaned more towards the Democratic Party since Trump first made inflammatory remarks towards Asian Americans. Whites, Blacks, and Latina/os, on the other hand, exhibited fewer and less consistent changes in Democratic Party-related attitudes. Our findings suggest that experiences with social exclusion that are driven by elite sources further cement Asian Americans as Democrats.
The Intersection of Candidate Gender and Ethnicity: How Voters Respond to Campaign Messages from Latinas
Martina Santia & Nichole Bauer
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the recent surge of women of color in elected political office in the U.S., the representation of Latinas is strikingly low. Past research offers unclear conclusions as to whether Latina political candidates face biases due to the intersection of their identities as women and as ethnic minorities, and how Latinas can navigate such biases. In this study, we identify how Latinas draw on their intersectional identities as both women and ethnic minorities to develop strategic campaign messages and how voters respond to such messages. Through an analysis of campaign advertising data and an original survey experiment, we show that Latina candidates do not face an automatic disadvantage based in gender and ethnic biases, but they can benefit from the intersection of these two identities, especially among female minority voters. These results are consequential because they offer insights into how to improve the descriptive and substantive representation of marginalized groups in the U.S.
From Brexit to Biden: What Responses to National Outcomes Tell Us About the Nature of Relief
Sara Lorimer et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent claims contrast relief experienced because a period of unpleasant uncertainty has ended and an outcome has materialized (temporal relief) - regardless of whether it is one's preferred outcome - with relief experienced because a particular outcome has occurred, when the alternative was unpalatable (counterfactual relief). Two studies (N = 993), one run the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union and one the day after Joe Biden's inauguration, confirmed these claims. "Leavers" and Biden voters experienced high levels of relief, and less regret and disappointment than "Remainers" and Trump voters. "Remainers" and Trump voters showed an effect of precursor, experiencing little relief about the outcome that had occurred but stronger relief that a decision had been implemented. Only Trump voters who believed the election was over showed this precursor effect. Results suggest at least two different triggering conditions for relief and indicate a role for anticipated relief in voting behavior.
How suspense and surprise enhance subsequent memory: The case of the 2016 United States Presidential Election
Adam Congleton & Dorthe Berntse
Memory, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined whether the retroactive enhancement effect - i.e., improved memory accuracy for event details occurring before a surprising moment - would be present in participants' memory for details in their private lives following a surprising and suspenseful public event. To equate event type across participants, we selected when they first learned the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential Election. Participants self-divided into those who viewed the outcome as positive, negative, or neutral, while we experimentally divided them into those whose memory was assessed 6 or 12 months post-election. We assessed their accuracy for details surrounding the election and their phenomenological experience of learning the outcome, including emotional tension, our operationalisation of suspense. We found participants' memory characteristics were strongly related to their level of tension and shock, irrespective of valence. We also observed uniformly high accuracy regarding details about the weather participants experienced in their ZIP codes on election day. While these results intimated about the presence of retroactive enhancement, Experiment 2 examined the effect more directly by comparing participants' memory for the 2016 Election with two other politically-relevant events that provoked less tense reactions. The results revealed retroactive enhancement is dependent upon experiencing a surprising moment amidst a suspenseful event.
Small Campaign Donors
Laurent Bouton et al.
Georgetown University Working Paper, December 2021
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the characteristics and behavior of small donors, and compare them to those of large donors. We first build a novel dataset including all the 340 million individual contributions reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission between 2005 and 2020. Due to the particular legal structure of the new online fundraising platforms first used by Democrats (ActBlue) and now Republicans (WinRed), we are able to extract contribution-level information about a majority of the small donations. This allows us to identify "small" donors, i.e. donors who give less than $200 during a two-year electoral cycle to each committee , and to differentiate them from "large" donors. The analysis of this novel dataset delivers several new insights. First, we provide evidence on the growing number of small donors in the U.S. and on the magnitude of their contributions. Second, we find that small donors include more women and more ethnic minorities than large donors - with minorities still under-represented - while they do not differ much in terms of their geographical distribution. Third, using a saturated fixed effects model to explore the determinants of contributions by small and large donors, we find that the closeness of a race, whether the candidate and the donor live in the same district or state, and, to a lesser extent, the ethnic alignment between the donor and the candidate have a positive impact on contributions. We also find that donors contribute more to more extreme candidates. These effects are lower for small donors. Finally, we show that campaign TV ads affect the number and the size of contributions, and more so for small donors.
The metaethical dilemma of epistemic democracy
Christoph Schamberger
Economics & Philosophy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Epistemic democracy aims to show, often by appeal to the Condorcet Jury Theorem, that democracy has a high chance of reaching correct decisions. It has been argued that epistemic democracy is compatible with various metaethical accounts, such as moral realism, conventionalism and majoritarianism. This paper casts doubt on that thesis and reveals the following metaethical dilemma: if we adopt moral realism, it is doubtful that voters are, on average, more than 0.5 likely to track moral facts and identify the correct alternative. By contrast, if we adopt conventionalism or majoritarianism, we cannot expect that voters are both competent and sincere. Either way, the conditions for the application of Condorcet's theorem are not met.
Nothing funnier than the news: Assessing Johnny Carson's comedic effect, past and present
Brian Calfano & Lori Cox Han
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Anecdotes abound of Johnny Carson's political influence as host of The Tonight Show, but no statistical assessment of this influence has featured in the academic literature. To address this gap between conventional wisdom and empirical evaluation, we report on findings from 1) both frequentist and Bayesian time series models of Carson's effect on President Richard Nixon's Gallup approval, and 2) a national survey experiment featuring distilled elements of Carson's approach to political comedy. The time series models find significant, but conditional, Carson effects on Nixon's approval between 1972 and 1974. Meanwhile, the experimental results show strong preference for Carson's approach to political humor (versus more contemporary styles). These findings offer additional dimensions to scholarly assessment of television comedy's political influence by providing empirical focus on the genre's foundational figure.