The Manchurian candidate
Asian Candidates in America: The Surprising Effects of Positive Racial Stereotyping
Neil Visalvanich
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Racial stereotyping has been found to handicap African American and Latino candidates in negative ways. It is less clear how racial stereotypes may change the fortunes of Asian candidates. This paper explores the candidacies of Asian Americans with an experiment run through Amazon Mechanical Turk as well as real-world evaluations of Asian American candidates using the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study. In my experiments, I find that Asian candidates do significantly better than white candidates across different biographical scenarios (conservative, liberal, and foreign). I find that, contrary to expectations, Asian candidates are not significantly disadvantaged from being immigrant and foreign born. My experimental results mirror my observational results, which show that Asian Democrats are significantly advantaged even when compared with whites. These results indicate that Asian candidates in America face a set of racial-political stereotypes that are unique to their racial subgroup.
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Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn & Gregory Major Blascovich
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
What accounts for the widespread support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential race? This experiment demonstrates that the changing racial demographics of America contribute to Trump's success as a presidential candidate among White Americans whose race/ethnicity is central to their identity. Reminding White Americans high in ethnic identification that non-White racial groups will outnumber Whites in the United States by 2042 caused them to become more concerned about the declining status and influence of White Americans as a group (i.e., experience group status threat), and caused them to report increased support for Trump and anti-immigrant policies, as well as greater opposition to political correctness. Increased group status threat mediated the effects of the racial shift condition on candidate support, anti-immigrant policy support, and opposition to political correctness. Among Whites low in ethnic identification, in contrast, the racial shift condition had no effect on group status threat or support for anti-immigrant policies, but did cause decreased positivity toward Trump and decreased opposition to political correctness. Group status threat did not mediate these effects. Reminders of the changing racial demographics had comparable effects for Democrats and Republicans. Results illustrate the importance of changing racial demographics and White ethnic identification in voter preferences and how social psychological theory can illuminate voter preferences.
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Social Desirability, Hidden Biases, and Support for Hillary Clinton
Ryan Claassen & John Barry Ryan
PS: Political Science & Politics, October 2016, Pages 730-735
Abstract:
An emerging consensus suggests that women are underrepresented in government because of biases in the recruitment process instead of biases at the ballot box. These results, however, are largely for legislative offices, and research suggests that "male" characteristics are generally associated with executive positions like the presidency. At the same time, some research demonstrates social desirability masks gender biases against women who seek the highest office in the land. We use the historic candidacy of Hillary Clinton to examine if she faces hidden biases in either the primaries or the general election. Two different methods for uncovering hidden biases embedded in national surveys demonstrate small hidden biases that are likely electorally inconsequential.
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Yarrow Dunham, Antonio Arechar & David Rand
Yale Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Political identification is strong, stable, and the basis of enduring conflict, suggesting that attitudes towards candidates and their supporters will be difficult to change. Here, however, we show that the shift from party primaries (characterized by intra-party conflict) to the general election (characterized by inter-party conflict) can cause identities to be reconfigured - animosities between supporters of rival primary candidates can attenuate as superordinate goals (defeat rival party) and superordinate identities (Democrat/Republican) come to the fore. We provide a fine-grained account of these temporal dynamics by collecting data weekly from mid-June to early September 2016 (total N = 2,183), examining prosocial giving between supporters of competing primary candidates recruited from the online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk. At the outset of our study, both Democrats and Republicans showed intra-party bias: that is, they shared more money with people from their own party who supported the same primary candidate compared to members of their own party who supported a different primary candidate. This in-group bias among Democrats remained high until the Democratic National Convention, and then disappeared entirely shortly thereafter. Bias among Republicans, conversely, existed at a high level both before and after, but not during, the conventions. These findings emphasize both the discontinuity and contingency of changing identities. The abrupt elimination of bias among Democrats, but resurgence of bias among Republicans, suggests that a superordinate goal of defeating the other party (which was salient for both sides during the shift to the general election and was particularly emphasized during party conventions) was not sufficient to bring supporters of different primary candidates together for a sustained period. Rather, sustained change may require successful efforts to emphasize shared (superordinate) party-based identity - a task which our data suggest the Democratic National Convention succeeded in achieving.
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Donald
Diana Mutz
PS: Political Science & Politics, October 2016, Pages 722-729
Abstract:
Few empirical studies suggest that fictional stories can influence political opinions. Nonetheless, in this study I demonstrate the relevance of Harry Potter consumption to oppositional attitudes toward Donald Trump and his worldview. Using multivariate observational models and panel data from 2014 to 2016, results suggest that the lessons of the Harry Potter series have influenced levels of opposition to punitive policies and support for tolerance of groups considered outside the American mainstream. Further, they predict public reactions to Donald Trump above and beyond their influence on policies consistent with his views.
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Anthony Fowler
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Fall 2016, Pages 313-338
Abstract:
Incumbents significantly outperform challengers in American elections, but the implications of this phenomenon are ambiguous. Do otherwise unpopular incumbents exploit the political system to stay in power, or do open elections effectively select good candidates who will naturally win reelection? To address this question, I estimate the extent of incumbent success that can be attributed three factors - party match, characteristic selection, and officeholder benefit. Across numerous settings in the U.S., a significant portion of incumbent success can be attributed to the tendency of previous elections to select popular candidates that match the partisan preferences of voters. On average, party match explains about five-eighths of incumbent success and characteristic selection explains one-eighth, leaving only one quarter to be explained by the effects of holding office. These results also vary in meaningful ways across time periods, settings, and electoral institutions.
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Tiffany Barnes, Regina Branton & Erin Cassese
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article reexamines gender differences in electoral outcomes. We consider whether electoral competition has a differential impact on the electoral fortunes of male and female quality candidates. This study uses an original data set containing detailed candidate information for US House open seat primary and general elections between 1994 and 2004. The results indicate that when multiple quality candidates enter the race, female quality candidates are at a greater disadvantage than their male counterparts. The results suggest that null findings from previous work are a product of the way the relationship between gender and electoral outcomes is typically modeled.
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Jon Bruschke & Laura Divine
Social Science Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is widely reported that Nixon won the first of the 1960 presidential debates among radio audiences while Kennedy carried television viewers, and further that Kennedy's victory translated to an electoral victory. It is thus assumed that style trumped substance when politics entered the television age. However, the Nixon radio victory emerged in only a single poll conducted by Sindlinger and Company. Considering other polling data reveals Sindlinger's finding is likely the result of a Republican bias in the sample and not a mass defection of Democrats swayed by Nixon's substantive arguments. Voters found Kennedy ahead on substance as well as style. Considering the full historical context of the election, there is little evidence that television worked to the advantage of Kennedy and the disadvantage of Nixon, nor even much evidence that Kennedy was considered more attractive. We find no evidence that the first debate was decisive; we find it dubious that the debates overall produced a 2-million vote swing for Kennedy; we find it implausible that the first debate can be linked in any meaningful way to the outcome of the election. We find it more meaningful that Nixon turned a 5-to-3 Republican disadvantage into a razor-thin contest and that he largely did so using television during the final two weeks of the contest. The 1960 election should not be read as a triumph of style over substance. Correcting the misguided dismissal of substantive argument is crucial work scholars can contribute to the broader democratic project.
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Are You My Mentor? An Experiment on Gender and Political Encouragement
Joshua Kalla, Frances McCall Rosenbluth & Dawn Teele
University of California Working Paper, September 2016
Abstract:
Do electoral gatekeepers routinely discourage women from running for office? Through an audit experiment with 8,189 public officials, we examine whether (hypothetical) male and female students who express interest in political careers receive differential encouragement from electoral gatekeepers. We report three striking findings. First, emails sent by female students were more likely to receive a response than those sent by male students, especially when the official was male. Second, the responses women received were as likely to be long, thoughtful, and contain an offer of help as those to men. Third, there were no partisan differences in responsiveness to male or female senders. Examining senders with Hispanic last names bolsters the credibility of the results: Hispanic senders, especially men, were less likely to receive a quality response than non-Hispanic senders. These findings suggest that unequal encouragement by public officials is not a likely culprit of women's under-representation in politics.
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In the Shadows of Sunlight: The Effects of Transparency on State Political Campaigns
Abby Wood & Douglas Spencer
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, the courts have invalidated a variety of campaign finance laws while simultaneously upholding disclosure requirements. Courts view disclosure as a less-restrictive means to root out corruption while critics claim that disclosure chills speech and deters political participation. Using individual-level contribution data from state elections between 2000 and 2008, we find that the speech-chilling effects of disclosure are negligible. On average, less than one donor per candidate is likely to stop contributing when the public visibility of campaign contributions increases. Moreover, we do not observe heterogeneous effects for small donors or ideological outliers despite an assumption in First Amendment jurisprudence that these donors are disproportionately affected by campaign finance regulations. In short, the argument that disclosure chills speech is not strongly supported by the data.
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Does State Online Voter Registration Increase Voter Turnout?
Jinhai Yu
University of Kentucky Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
More and more states have been adopting online voter registration in recent years. Investigating the impact of the policy on voter turnout can inform policy-making and contribute to our knowledge of political behavior. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) data between 2000 and 2014, I conduct a difference-in-difference analysis at the state level and then an instrumental variable regression at the individual level. The difference-in-difference analysis shows that online voter registration has no impact on voter turnout for the general population but does increase the turnout for young voters by about 1 percentage point. The effects of online registration on turnout for the younger voters are stronger in states with earlier registration closing dates and without same day registration. The user identification requirements of state online registration systems have heterogeneous impacts for the voters of different age groups. The instrumental variable regression shows that the upper limit of the impact of online registration on voter turnout is about 7 to 12 percentage points. This study contributes to the existing literature on electoral regulations by estimating the causal effect of a new, important election reform.
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Reducing the Cost of Voting: An Empirical Evaluation of Internet Voting's Effect on Local Elections
Nicole Goodman & Leah Stokes
University of Toronto Working Paper, October 2016
Abstract:
Voting models assume that voting costs impact turnout. As turnout declined across advanced democracies, reformers cycled through a series of electoral changes aimed at reducing costs to increase participation. Internet voting, used in elections across a dozen countries, promises to reduce voting costs dramatically, to a level most citizens incur numerous times daily. Yet, identifying its effect on turnout has proven difficult due to data limitations. We use an original panel data set of local elections in Ontario, Canada and fixed effects estimators. Results show internet voting can increase turnout by 3%, an amount comparable to other convenience reforms' effects. More citizens use internet voting when registration is not required, suggesting relative costs matter to the methods citizens choose to vote. Our estimates suggest that internet voting is unlikely to solve the low turnout crisis, indicating that cost arguments do not fully account for voting declines across advanced democracies.
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Accountability and Information in Elections
Scott Ashworth, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita & Amanda Friedenberg
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elections are thought to improve voter welfare through two channels: effective accountability (i.e., providing incentives for politicians to take costly effort) and electoral selection (i.e., retaining politicians with characteristics voters value). We show that there may be a trade-off between these two channels. Higher levels of effective accountability may hinder the voters' ability to learn about the politicians. In turn, this may hinder electoral selection and be detrimental to voter welfare. This is because increasing effective accountability directly impacts how informative governance outcomes are about an incumbent's type. We show that, if politicians' effort and type are local substitutes (resp. complements) in the production of governance outcomes, an increase in effective accountability corresponds to a decrease (resp. increase) in Blackwell (1951) informativeness. We also show that effective accountability can vary even absent institutional variation. In particular, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be multiple equilibria that differ in terms of both effective accountability and electoral selection. Overall, our findings have implications for voter behavior, the efficacy of institutional reforms, and voter welfare.
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Voluntary Taxation and Beyond - The Promise of Social-Contracting Voting Mechanisms
Ian Ayres
Yale Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
Would you volunteer to pay a carbon tax if 99% of other Americans also volunteered to pay such a tax? Instead of traditional referenda, it is possible to structure plebiscites which would only bind a subset of the population (for example, to be subject to a carbon tax) if that subset's individually chosen conditions for participation are met. While provision-point mechanisms with exogenously set provision points have garnered billions of dollars in private contributions, a broader class of "social contracting" mechanisms exist that allow individuals to bid on their preferred provision points. This article shows how both partial and probabilistic bidding schemes might foster voluntary subpopulation participation in a range of public good applications, and reports results from a series of randomized surveys of Internet respondents assessing the potential support for such subgroup "social contracting." The respondent bids would, for example, support an equilibrium in which approximately 25% of the public would voluntarily commit to pay an additional 10% tax on electricity. Provision-point bidding and probability-bidding mechanisms are shown to increase willingness to participate both in voluntary taxation and in civil disobedience experiments. A probability-bidding mechanism increases the expected number of civil disobedience volunteers more than 9-fold relative to a mechanism where the probability of participation is exogenously given. In a separate sexual assault reporting experiment, subgroup social contracting is shown to shift 10% of subjects from informal reporting to matching escrows without cannibalizing the proportion of subjects who report formally - thus enhancing the expected number of sexual assault complaints that will ultimately be investigated.
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James Adams et al.
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Models of voting behavior typically specify that all voters employ identical criteria to evaluate candidates. We argue that moderate voters weigh candidates' policy/ideological positions far less than non-moderate voters, and we report analyses of survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study that substantiate these arguments. Across a wide range of models and measurement strategies, we find consistent evidence that liberal and conservative voters are substantially more responsive to candidate ideology than more centrist voters. Simply put, moderate voters appear qualitatively different from liberals and conservatives, a finding that has important implications for candidate strategies and for political representation.
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Adam Chamberlain & Carl Klarner
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we evaluate the rationale behind partisan disaffiliation laws, which prevent a candidate from running as an independent or from switching parties if they have not adequately severed their ties to an existing party. One prominent justification for these laws is that they help prevent voter confusion, which may result in the most preferred candidate losing. Utilizing a database of state legislative elections from 1968 to 2014, we categorize independent and third-party candidates into two groups: those who have run in the past as a Democrat or Republican, whom we refer to as former major-party candidates (FMPs), and those who have always run as a non-major party candidate (ANMs). The findings reveal that the latter appear less strategic about where to run, and they are unlikely to run again. In contrast, FMPs are much more likely to have held state legislative office and are more likely to have run multiple times; they are also more strategic, running under conditions that are advantageous for non-major party candidates. Voters react to this, giving ANMs far fewer votes than FMPs and being more apt to vote for them when "spoiling" an election is less likely. As a result, ANMs rarely deny winning candidates majorities, while FMPs who have won office in the past do so more than half the time. Our findings regarding "vote stealing" do not indicate a systematic tendency for FMPs to take substantially more votes from the party they recently left in comparison to the other major party. Overall, our findings indicate that partisan disaffiliation laws achieve the objectives they are designed to promote.