Throwing the Bums Out
The effects of public campaign funding: Evidence from Seattle's Democracy Voucher program
Alan Griffith & Thomas Noonen
Journal of Public Economics, July 2022
Abstract:
During each election cycle, the city of Seattle distributes four $25 vouchers to every registered voter, which may be donated to and redeemed by campaigns for city office. Through a difference-in-differences research design, we study the causal effect of Seattle’s program on various outcomes in city council elections in the first two cycles after implementation, with comparison cities drawn from large cities in Washington and California. We find a 53% increase in total contributions and a 350% increase in number of unique donors; these effects are largely explained by large increases in small donations, defined as contributions less than $200. We find statistically insignificant evidence of decreases in private donations, although our point estimates suggest moderate-to-substantial crowd-out ratios. We further estimate a highly significant 86% increase in number of candidates coupled with substantial decreases in incumbent electoral success. These results provide some of the first causal evidence of the effect of decentralized public campaign finance schemes, while speaking to the impacts of campaign regulation more generally on donation activity, candidate entry, and incumbency advantage.
Out-of-State Contributions Provide Non-Incumbent House Candidates with a Competitive Edge
Anne Baker
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Out-of-state donors’ contributions represent a growing share of fundraising receipts for House candidates. This raises the question of whether out-of-state contributions simply represent more money flowing to the campaigns’ coffers or whether these monies could be worth more than their outright cash value. Using campaign finance data from the U.S. Federal Election Commission 2010-2018, I examine both the fundraising and electoral impacts of non-incumbent House candidates’ receipt of these funds using structural equation modeling, a matching analysis, and a regression analysis. I uncover evidence that out-of-state contributions are an indication of the candidate’s integration into the extended party network (EPN) finding they are closely tied to interest group support. Out-of-state contributions are also found to have a positive impact on non-incumbent House candidates’ competitiveness, which likely stems from the broader support of the EPN.
Razor-Thin Elections
David Levine & César Martinelli
George Mason University Working Paper, June 2022
Abstract:
We argue that standard models that solve the paradox of voting do a bad job explaining the frequency of very close elections. We instead model head-to-head elections as a competition between incentive schemes to turn out voters. We show that elections are either heavily contested, and decided by thin margins, or safe, meaning that voters in one of the two sides effectively give in, possibly leading to a landslide in favor of the larger side. In equilibrium, improvements in the quality of polling make contested elections with razor-thin margins more likely.
Social Justice Campaigns and Democratic Party Gains: How Georgia's Partisan Reformers Overtook North Carolina's Moral Advocates
Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo & Kirsten Walters
Studies in American Political Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
How did Democrats running for federal office win in Georgia in 2020–21, but not in North Carolina, a state long regarded as more “flippable”? This article uses newly assembled organizational data to situate recent Democratic fortunes in the context of two long-running statewide campaigns for racial and economic justice — led by North Carolina's Reverend William Barber II and Georgia's Stacey Abrams. We track shifting political opportunity structures and the organizational and strategic evolution of both movements during the 2010s, with a special focus on outreach beyond major metropolitan areas. Our findings suggest that social justice campaigns aiming to increase government responsiveness to poor minority citizens do better if they engage in persistent, locally embedded voter outreach along partisan lines rather than heavily relying on morally framed, media-friendly protests. This research also demonstrates how data on organizational networks can be assembled and used to explore historical-institutional hypotheses about the development and impact of social movements.
Did Trade Liberalization with China Influence US Elections?
Yi Che et al.
Journal of International Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine election voting and legislators’ roll-call votes in the United States over a twenty-five year period. Voters in areas more exposed to trade liberalization with China in 2000 subsequently shift their support toward Democrats, relative to the 1990s, though this boost for Democrats wanes after the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. House members’ votes in Congress rationalize these trends, with Democratic representatives disproportionately supporting protection during the early 2000s. Together, these results imply that voters in areas subject to higher import competition shifted votes toward the party more likely to restrict trade.
Civilian national service programs can powerfully increase youth voter turnout
Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, John Holbein & Elizabeth Mitchell Elder
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 19 July 2022
Abstract:
Low rates of youth voting are a feature of contemporary democracies the world over, with the United States having some of the lowest youth turnout rates in the world. However, far too little is known about how to address the dismal rates of youth voter participation found in many advanced democracies. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of a potentially scalable solution that has attracted renewed interest today: voluntary national service programs targeted at the youth civilian population. Leveraging the large pool of young people who apply each year to participate in the Teach For America (TFA) program — a prominent voluntary national service organization in the United States that integrates college graduates into teaching roles in low-income communities for 2 y — we examine the effect of service participation on voter turnout. To do so, we match TFA administrative records to large-scale nationwide voter files and employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the recommended admittance cutoff for the TFA program. We find that serving as a teacher in the Teach For America national service program has a large effect on civic participation—substantially increasing voter turnout rates among applicants admitted to the program. This effect is noticeably larger than that of previous efforts to increase youth turnout. Our results suggest that civilian national service programs targeted at young people have great promise in helping to narrow the stubborn and enduring political engagement gap between younger and older citizens.
Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections
Hillary Shulman et al.
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two laboratory studies (N = 240) were designed to explain and predict how people make decisions in low-information political environments. Guided by feelings-as-information theory, it was argued that when direct democracy ballot issues do not receive any campaign expenditures and are not about moral/civic issues, voters are likely to encounter these ballots for the first time in the voting booth. And when this is the case, how these ballots are written should affect vote choice. In support of study hypotheses, it was found that the difficulty of the words on the ballot affected people’s processing fluency, defined as the ease with which people processed the information presented. In turn, self-reports of processing fluency influenced vote choice. Specifically, easier texts were more likely to be supported and difficult texts were more likely to be opposed or abstained from voting on. As hypothesized, this relationship was mediated through self-reports of processing fluency. Additionally, to demonstrate the external validity of this process, it was found that the voting results obtained in the two laboratory studies replicated real-world election results 86% of the time. These results offer communicative and psychological insight into how communication affects information processing, and how these processing experiences inform political decisions of consequence to everyday life.
Turnout Turnaround: Ethnic Minority Victories Mobilize White Voters
Stephanie Zonszein & Guy Grossman
University of California Working Paper, July 2022
Abstract:
In many countries, the number of ethnic minority representatives has been steadily increasing. How is such a trend shaping electoral behavior? Past work has generally focused on the political engagement of ethnic minorities as a response to having a co-ethnic on the ballot. In contrast, less attention has been devoted to assessing whether an ethnic minority incumbent shapes the electoral behavior of majority-group members. We argue that increased political representation of minorities can be experienced as an external threat to a historically white dominant political context. This in turn may politically activate white constituents aiming to revert their (perceived) disempowerment. We test this argument employing a novel dataset that characterizes candidates' ethnicity, covering four UK Parliamentary general elections, and a regression discontinuity design of close elections between ethnic minority and majority-group candidates. Comparing constituencies that are otherwise identical, except for being represented by a minority Member of Parliament (MP), we find that an MP's ethnicity matters for electoral participation: turnout in constituencies narrowly represented by an ethnic minority MP is 3.6 percentage points larger than in constituencies narrowly represented by a white MP. Consistent with our argument, we find that such difference in turnout is driven by majority-white constituencies, and that voters in these constituencies choose the party of the minority incumbent’s strongest white opponent. However, this dynamic does not overpower minorities' incumbency advantage, but it contributes to polarizing the electorate along ethnic lines. Our findings have important implications for intergroup relations, political behavior, and recent political dynamics more broadly.
Knowing the Competition: Gender, Qualifications, and Willingness to Run in Elections
Richard Fox & Jennifer Pate
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In spite of significant gains in recent elections, women’s under-representation in U.S. politics remains an empirical fact. Scholars have identified the persistent gender gap in political ambition as a key component. Research to date has focused on explaining the gender gap in political ambition by identifying gender differences in factors such as self-assessed qualifications, recruitment experiences, risk aversion, and competitiveness. The conventional wisdom emerged that because of these gender differences, potential women candidates need more encouragement than men to overcome reservations about running for office. These propositions remain largely untested. Using an innovative experimental design that allows us to directly examine how individuals respond to information about candidate qualifications in real time, we make several substantive contributions to understanding the role of gender in the decision to run for office. First, we find that women are highly responsive to information about their qualifications to run for office, in some cases more so than their male counterparts. In doing so, we shine a spotlight on how men often ignore information about their own unsuitability to run for office. We also find that being presented with multiple chances to run for election has a positive, but limited effect on women’s political ambition.
Hostile Sexism, Benevolent Sexism, and American Elections
Nicholas Winter
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Analyzing unique, nationally representative data, I show that two faces of sexism — hostile and benevolent — operate in systematically different ways to shape Americans’ electoral decisions and evaluations of their leaders. In the 2016 presidential election, both fostered support for Donald Trump and opposition to Hillary Clinton. They operated differently at the congressional level, however. In analyses of actual congressional candidates and in a conjoint experiment, the impact of hostile sexism is moderated by candidate sex: those high in hostile sexism oppose (and those low in hostile sexism favor) female candidates. Benevolent sexism is moderated by candidates’ symbolically gendered leadership styles: those high in benevolent sexism oppose candidates with feminine styles and favor candidates with masculine styles, regardless of whether the candidate is male or female. I conclude with discussion of the implications of the two faces of sexism for the role of gender and power in American elections.