Out for the Count
The Effects of Unsubstantiated Claims of Voter Fraud on Confidence in Elections
Nicolas Berlinski et al.
Journal of Experimental Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections -- a time when many prominent Republicans also made unsubstantiated fraud claims -- we show that exposure to claims of voter fraud reduces confidence in electoral integrity, though not support for democracy itself. The effects are concentrated among Republicans and Trump approvers. Worryingly, corrective messages from mainstream sources do not measurably reduce the damage these accusations inflict. These results suggest that unsubstantiated voter-fraud claims undermine confidence in elections, particularly when the claims are politically congenial, and that their effects cannot easily be mitigated by fact-checking.
(Almost) No One Votes Without ID, Even When They Can
Mark Hoekstra & Vijetha Koppa
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper documents whether enacting a strict voter identification law could affect voter turnout and election outcomes. It uses historical data on more than 2,000 races in Florida and Michigan, which both allow and track ballots cast without identification. Results indicate that at most only 0.1% and 0.3% of total votes cast in each state were cast without IDs. Thus, even under the extreme assumption that all voters without IDs were either fraudulent or would be disenfranchised by a strict law, such a law would have only a very small effect on turnout and election outcomes.
Who Votes Without Identification? Using Individual-Level Administrative Data to Measure the Burden of Strict Voter Identification Laws
Phoebe Henninger, Marc Meredith & Michael Morse
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, June 2021, Pages 256-286
Abstract:
Legal disputes over laws that require certain forms of identification (ID) to vote mostly focus on the burden placed on people who do not possess ID. We contend that this singular focus ignores the burden imposed on people who do possess ID, but nonetheless cannot access it when voting. To measure this alternative conception of burden, we focus on Michigan, which allows anyone who lacks access to ID to vote after signing an affidavit. A sample of affidavits filed in the 2016 presidential election from a random set of precincts reveals that about 0.45 percent of voters lacked access to ID. Consistent with our broader conception of the burden of voter ID laws, nearly all voters who filed an affidavit were previously issued a still-active state ID. Importantly, we show minority voters were about five times more likely to lack access to ID than white voters. We also present survey evidence suggesting that people who live in states where voters are asked to show ID, as in Michigan, are more likely to incorrectly believe that access to ID is required to vote than are people who live in states that do not ask voters to show ID.
Who is mobilized to vote by information about voter ID laws?
Kyle Endres & Costas Panagopoulos
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Advocacy groups often work to educate the public about voting requirements following changes to election laws. These outreach efforts have the potential to mobilize partisan groups who consider the laws a threat to their party's electoral prospects. In the 2017 Virginia election, we partnered with an advocacy organization to conduct a field experiment evaluating the effects of the organization's outreach campaign. We randomized which registered voters were mailed one of three informational postcards providing details about voter identification requirements in place at the time in Virginia. Overall, the postcards had minimal effects on turnout compared to the no-contact control group. However, each version of the postcards significantly increased turnout among subgroups based on their underlying partisanship and/or vote-propensity. Democrats were significantly mobilized by postcards highlighting the potentially disproportionate impact of ID laws on demographic groups that traditionally support the Democratic Party, with approximately a two percentage point increase in turnout overall, and even higher increases among high vote-propensity Democrats. A simple, informational postcard, on the other hand, elevated turnout among low vote-propensity recipients by two percentage points. The postcard treatments did not significantly increase turnout among Republicans or mid vote-propensity registrants of either party.
Stepping Out of the Shadows: Expert Reports on the Disparate Impact of Voter ID Laws
Joshua Hochberg
Tufts University Working Paper, May 2021
Abstract:
In this article, I analyze the expert reports and testimony of social scientists during voter ID litigation. This shadow literature, which matches registered voters to state and federal ID databases, has received scant attention from legal scholars and political scientists. Here, I find that while habitual white voters are more likely to possess an ID than habitual voters of color, this gap is slim. My findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the disparate impact of voter ID laws.
How Does Job Loss Affect Voting? Understanding Economic Voting Using Novel Data on COVID-19 Induced Individual-Level Unemployment Shocks
Jennifer Wu & Gregory Huber
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research on economic voting generally finds that national economic performance affects incumbent support. However, the degree to which one's personal economic situation shapes vote choice remains less clear. In this study, we use novel survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide more credible evidence about the effect of changes in personal economic experiences on intended vote choice. Our design uses an objective measure of change in personal economic situation by asking respondents their employment status prior to the pandemic and at the time of the survey. Given the widespread and abrupt way in which the pandemic induced unemployment, we argue that this design reduces concerns about confounders that explain both vote choice and job loss. Our analysis demonstrates that individuals whose personal economic conditions worsened during the pandemic were significantly less like to intend to vote for Trump in the 2020 election.
Politically Invisible in America
Simon Jackman & Bradley Spahn
PS: Political Science & Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible - that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.
Are Political Attacks a Laughing Matter? Three Experiments on Political Humor and the Effectiveness of Negative Campaigning
Iris Verhulsdonk, Alessandro Nai & Jeffrey Karp
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on the effectiveness of negative campaigning offers mixed results. Negative messages can sometimes work to depress candidate evaluations, but they can also backfire against the attacker. In this article, we examine how humor can help mitigate the unintended effects of negative campaigning using data from three experimental studies in the United States and the Netherlands. Our results show that (1) political attacks combined with "other-deprecatory humor" (i.e., jokes against the opponents) are less likely to backfire against the attacker and can even increase positive evaluations of this latter-especially when the attack is perceived as amusing. At the same time and contrary to what we expected, (2) humor does not blunt the attack: humorous attacks are not less effective against the target than serious attacks. All in all, these results suggest that humor can be a good strategy for political attacks: jokes reduce harmful backlash effects against the attacker, and humorous attacks remain just as effective as humorless ones. When in doubt, be funny. All data and materials are openly available for replication.
Modelling the Effectiveness of US Presidential TV Advertisements
Mark Taylor
Washington University in St. Louis Working Paper, June 2021
Abstract:
I analyze a data set on the characteristics of 399 US presidential TV ads for seventeen election campaigns, 1952-2016, by modelling their impact on the probability of the candidate favored in each ad winning the presidential election to which the ad relates. Certain emotional variables are found to dominate, although the mention of civil rights in TV ads is negatively significant. The model, out of sample, picks the winner in both the 2012 and 2016 election campaigns. I also test whether the estimated model of TV ad effectiveness is mimicking the macroeconomic fundamentals and find that this is not the case. While the direction of causality cannot be definitively determined by statistical analysis, the results quantitatively indicate the importance of emotional characteristics of TV ads used in successful and unsuccessful presidential campaigns.
Are You My Candidate? Gender, Undervoting, and Vote Choice in Same-Party Matchups
Katelyn Stauffer & Colin Fisk
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisanship is the dominant force that dictates American electoral behavior. Yet Americans often participate in elections in which either the partisanship of candidates is unknown or candidates from the same party compete, rendering the partisan cue meaningless. In this research, we examine how candidate demographics-specifically gender-relate to voter behavior and candidate selection in these contexts. Leveraging survey data from same-party matchups in congressional elections (resulting from "top-two primaries"), we examine the relationship between candidate gender and undervoting and vote choice. We find that in same-party matchups, women candidates are associated with lower levels of undervoting among women voters. Furthermore, we find that in mixed-gender contests, women voters from both parties and Democratic men are more likely to favor female candidates. The findings presented here have important implications for the literatures on gender and politics, electoral politics, partisanship, and the design of electoral institutions.
Men and women candidates are similarly persistent after losing elections
Rachel Bernhard & Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 29 June 2021
Abstract:
Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? Women's first-time candidacies skyrocketed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Yet we have little sense of the long-term impact of this surge in women candidates on women's representation writ large: Inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. This might make the benefits of such a surge in candidacies fleeting. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 212,805 candidates across 22,473 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women's lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women's decision-making differs from men's at the point of entry into politics - not at the point of reentry.
Sleepy Joe? Recalling and Considering Donald Trump's Strategic Use of Nicknames
Tyler Johnson
Journal of Political Marketing, forthcoming
Abstract:
From the beginning of his first presidential run in 2015, Donald Trump regularly used nicknames to deride his opponents' appearances, demeanors, beliefs, or personal histories. Employing such nicknames defied norms of campaigning and captured media attention, but little is known about how these monikers penetrated public awareness, were perceived by the public, and shaped evaluations of those targeted. Examining Trump's effort to label Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe" offers a window through which to begin to answer such questions. Findings from an August 2020 survey experiment reveal that those who participate in politics are likely to contemporaneously know the nicknames Trump is using during the campaign. Perceptions of nickname accuracy were shaped by political beliefs. Amongst a random subset of survey participants asked to consider the use and intent of "Sleepy Joe" more deeply, those who knew it going in and also approved of how the President did his job were the only ones to look significantly more negatively upon Biden. Subsequent findings also reveal the extent to which Americans have forgotten Trump's nicknames of past rivals, calling into question whether such a strategy leaves lasting legacies.