Real Elections
Unsuccessful Candidates Are More Concerned About Electoral Fairness than Election Winners
Roman Senninger, Martin Baekgaard & Henrik Seeberg
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Democracy requires the losers of an election to accept their defeat to ensure a peaceful transition of power. However, we know little about how losing affects candidates' perceptions of the election. Using a regression discontinuity design and survey responses from hundreds of candidates in a country-wide election in Denmark -- one of the most robust democracies in the world -- we find that candidates who fail to win a seat are more concerned about electoral fairness than election winners. The corresponding effect of losing is 0.46 (95% CI: 0.10, 0.82) points using a five-point electoral fairness index or 0.6 SD. Our findings have important implications because they suggest that the core democratic institution of elections may paradoxically fuel discontent with democracy among the people who are supposed to be its strongest advocates.
How Partisan Are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records
Aleksandra Conevska et al.
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter's national partisanship, consistent with existing literature. However, we find that voting for local nonpartisan offices and ballot measures is much less partisan. National partisanship explains more than 80% of the within-contest variation in voting for partisan state and local offices but less than 10% for local nonpartisan contests and local ballot measures. The degree of partisanship in local spending measures varies by the type of service-for example, education, roads, public safety, housing. Finally, we find evidence of structure in the pattern of votes on local spending measures.
Do Primary Elections Exacerbate Congressional Polarization?
Anthony Fowler & Shu Fu
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do primary election incentives cause elected officials to take more extreme or partisan positions? We study this question for members of the U.S. Congress by leveraging variation in primary election dates across states. Implementing differences-in-differences designs that account for idiosyncratic differences between each member in each Congress and each bill by party, we test whether members vote differently before or after their state's primary election date. Members of Congress cast more ideologically extreme votes before they have secured their party's nomination, but the substantive magnitude of this effect is small, explaining approximately one percent of congressional polarization. We further find that the polarizing effect of primary elections is greater in the Senate, smaller on party-priority legislation, greater for more moderate members; and smaller in states utilizing nonpartisan primaries.
Bias toward progress-oriented leaders: People prefer progress- over maintenance-oriented leaders even when a maintenance orientation is required
Yael Ecker, Anne Weitzel & Joris Lammers
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
We uncover a dissociation between leadership preferences (for progress, protection, or maintenance-oriented leaders) and situational requirements (to make progress, protect, or maintain). Despite maintenance being crucial for sustaining groups' ongoing activity, we find a bias favoring progress-oriented leaders across contexts. In six preregistered experiments (Ntotal = 3,324), participants consistently preferred progress-oriented leaders even when they recognized maintenance as the primary situational need. In Experiment 1, people preferred progress- over maintenance-oriented political leaders in a mock-election paradigm even when maintenance was explicitly the dominant concern. In Experiment 2, participants chose progress-oriented group leaders in an incentivized group task, despite maintenance investments yielding greater monetary rewards. Furthermore, participants preferred maintenance-oriented over progress-oriented agendas but showed no (Experiment 3a) or opposite preference (Experiment 3b) when evaluating leaders who advocated identical policies. Our final studies test two explanations regarding the underlying process: Experiment 4 tests the idea that progress-oriented leaders are expected to invest more effort than others. However, manipulating perceived leader effort did not affect the preference for progress-oriented leaders. Instead, Experiment 5 identifies a different mechanism: Participants assume that progress-oriented leaders have wider goal scopes that also include maintenance goals, whereas maintenance-oriented leaders' goal scope is assumed to be limited to maintenance. Blocking this assumption by explicitly describing progress leaders as maintenance-neutral reversed the preference pattern. Together, these studies point to a systematic bias in leadership selection that persists regardless of situational demands or personal policy preferences, revealing how biased assumptions about progress-oriented leadership shape choices that undermine optimal collective decision making.
Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism
Mellissa Meisels
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The concept of candidate positioning is central to the study of U.S. elections, representation, and political behavior. Existing work, however, overwhelmingly relies on indirect measures which may not reflect candidates' stated positions. I analyze foundational relationships between candidate positions and district partisanship, primary electoral success, and primary fundraising performance with existing approaches versus text scaling estimates based on an original collection of campaign platforms from House primary candidates' websites in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Directly measuring candidates' positions using campaign platforms leads to conclusions vastly different than those reached with existing measures. While platform-based measures suggest candidates are responsive to their districts, existing measures do not. Within district, however, existing measures show financial and electoral penalties to extremism in primaries, but platform-based measures show no such penalty. These findings have wide-ranging implications for a number of ongoing scholarly debates which involve congressional candidates' positions.
America Decides, Networks Project: How Voters Respond to Election Night Coverage
Joseph Loffredo, Jillian Rothschild & Alejandro Flores
MIT Working Paper, August 2025
Abstract:
While election officials count votes and certify winners, media outlets play a critical yet unofficial role in presenting and contextualizing results. Public trust in elections, however, depends on whether outcomes are seen as clear, legitimate, and widely accepted. In a fragmented media environment, partisans increasingly rely on ideologically aligned outlets, raising the question: how can there be clarity and acceptance when the source and timing of projections differ? In this study, we utilize a series of survey vignette experiments fielded before and after the 2024 U.S. election to test this question. Our findings reveal that voter confidence is indeed shaped by projection source and timing, with conflicting projections eroding trust. We complement these experiments with a survey fielded on Election Night to examine the real-time dynamics of voter confidence and emotional affect. We find suggestive evidence that confidence fluctuates throughout Election Night among politically disengaged voters, while supporters of the losing candidate experience rising pessimism as the outcome becomes apparent. These results show that even when citizens receive the same substantive information, the context, perspective, and framing in which it is delivered shapes how it is processed. Thus, our work highlights that variation in the editorial choices of media outlets can deepen divides in how partisans evaluate the performance of elections. This underscores the need for both media and election officials to consider how election coverage influences voter confidence and to take steps that strengthen perceptions of democratic legitimacy.
Measuring Strategic Positioning in Congressional Elections
Colin Rafferty Case
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does an incumbent's issue positioning respond to an extreme (moderate) primary challenger? While theoretical models of electoral competition suggest incumbents should adopt more extreme (moderate) positions, prior empirical work testing this hypothesis does not find support for this hypothesis. I argue existing measures of campaign positioning are not suited to adequately test this hypothesis. To overcome these data limitations, I introduce Website EmBedding (WEB) Strategic Positioning Scores. WEB Scores employ word embeddings with document-level vectors trained on congressional candidates' issue statements, as presented on their campaign websites. These estimates have high construct validity and improve upon current measurement limitations, including expanding the number of candidates with estimates and using actual issue-position data to produce these estimates. Consistent with theoretical expectations, I show incumbent candidates become more extreme (moderate) in their issue positioning during the campaign in response to an extreme (moderate) primary challenger whereas previous measures do not.
The Impact of Earnings Season on Election Day
Gabe Brull, Austin Moss & Clare Wang
University of Colorado Working Paper, September 2025
Abstract:
U.S. presidential elections always fall in the middle of the third-quarter earnings season. We leverage establishment-level location data and voter-level survey data to provide evidence on the impact of local earnings news on voter perceptions and behavior for the six U.S. presidential elections held between 2000 and 2020. We show that better earnings news released before Election Day has an economically meaningful impact on individuals' propensity to vote for the incumbent party's presidential candidate. By contrast, earnings news released after Election Day does not have the same effect. We conclude that corporate earnings announcements serve as a relevant, salient, and reliable signal influencing voter perceptions of an administration's economic performance at a critical time in the election cycle.
Hillary Clinton, Female Voters, and Tall Poppies in the 2016 Election
Dave Bridge
Journal of Policy History, October 2025, Pages 269-283
Abstract:
This article investigates female voting behavior in the 2016 US presidential election through the lens of tall poppy syndrome, a theory suggesting that those in less prominent or celebrated roles sometimes seek to undermine individuals who pursue or attain extraordinary public success. Using data from the ANES, VOTER, and CCES surveys and controlling for alternative explanations, I find that women outside the workforce were more likely to vote against Hillary Clinton, indicating that their voting behavior may have been driven by tall poppy syndrome rather than solely by social conservatism. These findings highlight an underexplored factor in voting behavior, suggest widening avenues of partisan polarization, and point to the unique challenges that are faced by women who seek elected office.
Florida's Democracy Deserts: Patterns of Contestation and Cancellation of Florida Local Elections
Maxwell Clarke, Michael McDonald & Daniel Smith
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
A necessary condition for democracy is the periodic conduct of elections. U.S. federal and state governments must hold elections on specific dates mandated by law. However, Florida localities may run elections at times and manners largely of their choosing. Furthermore, elections in Florida are canceled if only one candidate qualifies for each office on the ballot. The confluence of these policies results in some Florida localities not holding elections for decades. Drawing on an original dataset of local elections across Florida, we explore the conditions under which Florida localities held -- or did not hold -- their most recent regularly scheduled at-large election. Jurisdiction size and whether the most recent regularly scheduled election was concurrent with state or federal contests are positively correlated but a council-manager form of government is negatively correlated with jurisdictions holding their last regularly scheduled election. These democracy deserts raise normative concerns about the state of representative governance in local jurisdictions in the United States.