Casting for votes
Conor Dowling & Amber Wichowsky
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group "do their dirty work," but particularly if a group does, and that the most likely explanation for why this is the case is that many voters simply do not connect candidates to the ads sponsored by parties and groups. We also find that in some circumstances, a group-sponsored attack ad produces less polarization than one sponsored by a party. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for current debates about the proper role of independent groups in electoral politics.
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Rain and Representation: The Effect of Margin of Victory on Incumbent Legislative Behavior
John Henderson & John Brooks
Yale Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
We develop and assess an elite-information account of representation. Accordingly, politicians face uncertainty about voter opinion, and use previous vote-margins to gauge their future electoral prospects. Unexpected losses in prior support will elicit ideological moderation given new information about an electorate. To test this account, we use rain around Election Day as a natural experiment in congressional voting. In studying U.S. House races from 1956 to 2008, we find each additional inch of election rainfall exogenously dampens Democratic vote-margins by 1.3 to 2.9 percentage points, and shifts incumbents rightward in their roll call positions in subsequent Congresses. We find this responsiveness mainly in competitive districts with the greatest risk of defeat, and by Democrats rather than Republicans suggesting asymmetry in party representation. Overall, we show that idiosyncratic electoral effects can meaningfully impact legislative behavior, and highlight an information mechanism that may help explain representation.
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Accuracy of Combined Forecasts for the 2012 Presidential Election: The PollyVote
Andreas Graefe et al.
PS: Political Science & Politics, April 2014, Pages 427-431
Abstract:
We review the performance of the PollyVote, which combined forecasts from polls, prediction markets, experts' judgment, political economy models, and index models to predict the two-party popular vote in the 2012 US presidential election. Throughout the election year the PollyVote provided highly accurate forecasts, outperforming each of its component methods, as well as the forecasts from FiveThirtyEight.com. Gains in accuracy were particularly large early in the campaign, when uncertainty about the election outcome is typically high. The results confirm prior research showing that combining is one of the most effective approaches to generating accurate forecasts.
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Tiffany Davenport
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When do government policies induce responsive political participation? This study tests two hypotheses in the context of military draft policies. First, policy-induced risk motivates political participation. Second, contextual-level moderators, such as local events that make risk particularly salient, may intensify the effect of risk on participation. I use the random assignment of induction priority in the Vietnam draft lotteries to measure the effect of a son's draft risk on the voter turnout of his parents in the 1972 presidential election. I find higher rates of turnout among parents of men with "losing" draft lottery numbers. Among parents from towns with at least one prior war casualty, I find a 7 to 9 percentage point effect of a son's draft risk on his parents' turnout. The local casualty contextual-level moderator is theorized to operate through the mechanism of an availability heuristic, whereby parents from towns with casualties could more readily imagine the adverse consequences of draft risk.
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Nichole Bauer
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. It is suspected that gender stereotypes hinder the electoral success of female candidates, but empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether stereotypes have a direct effect on voting decisions. This empirical conflict stems, in part, from the assumption that voters automatically rely on gender stereotypes when evaluating female candidates. This study explicitly tests the assumption of automatic stereotype activation. I suggest that stereotype reliance depends on whether stereotypes have been activated during a campaign, and it is only when stereotypes are activated that they influence evaluations of female candidates. These hypotheses are tested with a survey experiment and observational analysis. The results show that campaign communication activates stereotypes when they otherwise might not be activated, thereby diminishing support for female candidates.
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Early Processing of Gendered Facial Cues Predicts the Electoral Success of Female Politicians
Eric Hehman et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research examined how the typicality of gender cues in politicians' faces related to their electoral success. Previous research has shown that faces with subtle gender-atypical cues elicit cognitive competition between male and female categories, which perceivers resolve during face perception. To assess whether this competition adversely impacted politicians' electoral success, participants categorized the gender of politicians' faces in a hand-tracking paradigm. Gender-category competition was indexed by the hand's attraction to the incorrect gender response. Greater gender-category competition predicted a decreased likelihood of votes, but only for female politicians. Time-course analyses revealed that this outcome was evident as early as 380 ms following face presentation (Study 1). Results were replicated with a national sample, and effects became more pronounced as the conservatism of the constituency increased (Study 2). Thus, gender categorization dynamics during the initial milliseconds after viewing a female politician's face are predictive of her electoral success, especially in more conservative areas.
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Jason Anastasopoulos & Morris Levy
University of California Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
Can gender discrimination explain the limited growth of female election to the House of Representatives? Do female politicians lead to female voter empowerment? We answer these questions with a novel regression discontinuity design using close House primaries between 1982-2012. We find that female candidates do not effect political participation among women, but do effect participation among partisans. Female Republican candidates consistently depressed turnout among Democrats and had differential effects on Republican turnout across time. While they decreased turnout among Republicans in earlier elections, female Republican candidates increased turnout among Republicans in later elections. An analysis of the effect of female candidates on turnout by gender and party identification reveals that female candidates do not encourage women to vote. To the contrary, they were more likely to increase turnout among men. Female Democratic candidates increased turnout only among male Democrats while female Republican candidates differentially increased turnout only among male Independents.
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Philip Edward Jones
Politics & Gender, June 2014, Pages 175-199
Abstract:
Does the descriptive representation of gender affect how constituents respond to their legislators' substantive policy records? Previous work offers two distinctly opposing theories: the first, that descriptive representation may weaken accountability for substantive representation, if it leads female constituents to misperceive the incumbent's positions or give them a "free pass" on policy congruence; the second, that it may strengthen accountability, if it leads female constituents to pay greater attention to the incumbent and his or her record. Using survey data from three electoral cycles, I show that women are more likely to correctly identify their U.S. senators' policy records and weigh that record more heavily in their evaluations when they are represented by women. The descriptive representation of gender thus strengthens the links between the policy positions legislators take in office and how they are evaluated by their constituents.
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Weight bias in US candidate selection and election
Patricia Roehling et al.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Spring 2014, Pages 334-346
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to use data from the 2008 and 2012 US Senate elections to examine the relationship between candidate size (obese, overweight, normal weight) and candidate selection and election outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach: Using pictures captured from candidate web sites, participants rated the size of candidates in the primary and general US Senate elections. ?2 analyses, t-tests and hierarchical multiple regressions were used to test for evidence of bias against overweight and obese candidates and whether gender and election information moderate that relationship.
Findings: Obese candidates were largely absent from the pool of candidates in both the primary and general elections. Overweight women, but not overweight men, were also underrepresented. Supporting our hypothesis that there is bias against overweight candidates, heavier candidates tended to receive lower vote share than their thinner counterparts, and the larger the size difference between the candidates, the larger the vote share discrepancy. The paper did not find a moderating effect for gender or high-information high vs low-information elections on the relationship between candidate size and vote share.
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Campaign Finance in U.S. House Elections
Kei Kawai
NYU Working Paper, April 2014
Abstract:
This paper structurally estimates a dynamic model of fund-raising, campaign spending, and accumulation of war chest with unobserved candidate quality. We present an identification strategy similar to the one developed in the context of production function estimation that allows us to recover the quality (vote-getting ability) of the candidates. In our counterfactual experiment, we consider the equilibrium effects of government subsidies to challengers. We find that the subsidies substantially crowd out the challenger's fund-raising and increase the incumbent's fund-raising. Analysis that ignores these equilibrium effects substantially overestimates the effect of the policy.
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Senate Responsiveness to Minority Constituencies: Latino Electoral Strength and Representation
Jeffrey Fine & James Avery
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: While most research on minority representation in Congress finds that the African-American constituency size influences representation of the group's interests, most recent studies examining Latinos find no such relationship. We argue that the failure to find a relationship stems from the focus of prior research on the proportion of the Latino population in the total geographic constituency rather than the proportion of Latinos in the electoral constituency, what we term "Latino electoral strength" (LES).
Methods: Using data on Latino turnout at the state level, we examine the effect of LES on representation of Latino interests in the U.S. Senate. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) regression that accounts for the time serial, cross-sectional (TSCS) nature of our data.
Results: Consistent with other studies, we find no influence of Latino population size on Latino representation. However, LES has a significant, negative effect on Latino representation.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that greater LES leads to worse representation of their interests, and that this relationship increases as LES grows. This is consistent with existing studies of racial threat theory.
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James Adams & Samuel Merrill
Public Choice, July 2014, Pages 7-24
Abstract:
Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates' general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a primary, and we compare candidates' policy strategies in situations where primary voters strategically support the most viable general election candidate against candidate strategies when voters expressively support their preferred primary candidate regardless of electability. Our analyses - in which the candidates' appeal is based on their policy positions and their campaigning skills - suggest a surprising conclusion: namely, that strategic and expressive primary voting typically support identical equilibrium configurations in candidate strategies. Our conclusions are relevant to candidates facing contested primaries, and also to political parties facing the strategic decision about whether or not to use primary elections to select their candidates - a common dilemma for Latin American (and some European) parties.
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Bruce Desmarais, Raymond La Raja & Michael Kowal
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extended party network (EPN) theory characterizes political parties in the United States as dynamic networks of interest groups that collaboratively support favored candidates for office. Electoral predictions derived from EPN theory have yet to be tested on a large sample of races. We operationalize EPNs in the context of organized interest contributions to U.S. House campaigns. We deduce that support by a partisan community of interests signals the ideological credibility and appeal of a candidate. EPN integration overcomes voter ambiguity surrounding challengers' ideological preferences, and resources provided by these coordinating interest groups promote a consistent message about the candidate. Using data from the 1994-2010 cycles, we apply network analysis to detect EPN support of challengers and find that EPN integration substantially improves the electoral prospects of challengers. The effect of EPN integration is distinct from that of campaign resources. The findings provide support for EPN theory, as applied to congressional elections.
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From Voter ID to Party ID: How Political Parties Affect Perceptions of Election Fraud in the U.S.
Emily Beaulieu
Electoral Studies, September 2014, Pages 24-32
Abstract:
This paper uses a survey experiment to assess what individuals understand about election fraud and under what circumstances they see it as a problem. I argue that political parties are central to answering both these questions. Results from the 2011 CCES survey suggest respondents are able to differentiate between the relative incentives of Democrats and Republicans where fraud tactics are concerned, but whether voters see these tactics as problematic is heavily influenced by partisan bias. The results show little support for the notion that partisan ideology drives fraud assessments, and suggest support for the idea that individual concerns for fraud are shaped by a desire for their preferred candidate to win. These results offer insights that might be applied more broadly to questions of perceptions of electoral integrity and procedural fairness in democracies.
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The electoral consequences of two great crises
Johannes Lindvall
European Journal of Political Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Who benefits from deep economic crises: the left, the right or neither? On the basis of evidence from elections in 1929-1933 and 2008-2013 in all states that were democracies in both periods, it is argued in this article that the electoral consequences of the Great Depression and the Great Recession were surprisingly similar: in both periods, right-wing parties were at first more successful than left-wing parties, although this effect only lasted for a few years. The manner in which a crisis develops over time should be taken into account when examining the effects of deep economic downturns on the electoral fortunes of the left and the right.
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Gubernatorial Endorsements and Ballot Measure Approval
Craig Burnett & Janine Parry
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, June 2014, Pages 178-195
Abstract:
Voters often make decisions on ballot measures with limited information. Research shows, however, that elite endorsements can help voters overcome their information deficiencies. Using survey experiments, we evaluate the effect of a gubernatorial endorsement on three recent ballot measures. We find that identifying the governor as a proponent of a particular measure has a significant effect on respondents' support for only one of the three ballot measures we examine: a highly publicized health initiative in 2000. For two lower profile referendums on bonds supporting higher education (in 2006) and roads (in 2011), a gubernatorial endorsement proved ineffective. These results hold even when we restrict our sample to respondents who are the most likely to be influenced by the treatment. As a result, we tentatively conclude that gubernatorial endorsements, while valuable to some voters, are highly conditional.
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Scary Pictures: How Terrorism Imagery Affects Voter Evaluations
Shana Kushner Gadarian
Political Communication, Spring 2014, Pages 282-302
Abstract:
Journalists, candidates, and scholars believe that images, particularly images of war, affect the way that the public evaluates political leaders and foreign policy itself, but there is little direct evidence on the circumstances under which political elites can use imagery to enhance their electoral chances. Using National Election Studies (NES) panel data as well as two experiments, this article shows that, contrary to concerns about the manipulative power of imagery, the effect of evocative imagery can enhance candidate evaluations across partisan lines when they originate from the news but are more limited when they are used for persuasive purposes. By looking over time, the three data sets demonstrate different circumstances in which terrorism images have different effects on candidate evaluations -crisis versus non-crisis times and through news exposure versus direct use by a candidate. The NES data reveal that exposure to watching the World Trade Center fall on television increased positive evaluations of George W. Bush and the Republican party across partisan boundaries in 2002 and 2004. The news experiment that exposed subjects to graphic terrorism news in a lab in 2005/2006 increased approval of Bush's handling of terrorism among Democrats. Lastly, an experiment where hypothetical candidates utilized terrorism images in campaign communication in 2008 demonstrates that both parties' candidates can improve evaluations of their foreign policy statements by linking those statements to evocative imagery, but it is more effective among their own party members.
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The Relationship between Genes, Psychological Traits, and Political Participation
Christopher Dawes et al.
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research demonstrates that a wide range of political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors can be explained in part by genetic variation. However, these studies have not yet identified the mechanisms that generate such a relationship. Some scholars have speculated that psychological traits mediate the relationship between genes and political participation, but so far there have been no empirical tests. Here we focus on the role of three psychological traits that are believed to influence political participation: cognitive ability, personal control, and extraversion. Utilizing a unique sample of more than 2,000 Swedish twin pairs, we show that a common genetic factor can explain most of the relationship between these psychological traits and acts of political participation, as well as predispositions related to participation. While our analysis is not a definitive test, our results suggest an upper bound for a proposed mediation relationship between genes, psychological traits, and political participation.
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Cortisol and politics: Variance in voting behavior is predicted by baseline cortisol levels
Jeffrey French et al.
Physiology & Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Participation in electoral politics is affected by a host of social and demographic variables, but there is growing evidence that biological predispositions may also play a role in behavior related to political involvement. We examined the role of individual variation in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress axis parameters in explaining differences in self-reported and actual participation in political activities. Self-reported political activity, religious participation, and verified voting activity in U.S. national elections were collected from 105 participants, who were subsequently exposed to a standardized (nonpolitical) psychosocial stressor. We demonstrated that lower baseline salivary cortisol in the late afternoon was significantly associated with increased actual voting frequency in six national elections, but not with self-reported non-voting political activity. Baseline cortisol predicted significant variation in voting behavior above and beyond variation accounted for by traditional demographic variables (particularly age of participant in our sample). Participation in religious activity was weakly (and negatively) associated with baseline cortisol. Our results suggest that HPA-mediated characteristics of social, cognitive, and emotional processes may exert an influence on a trait as complex as voting behavior, and that cortisol is a better predictor of actual voting behavior, as opposed to self-reported political activity.
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The Persuasive Effects of Partisan Campaign Mailers
David Doherty & Scott Adler
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
A substantial literature has used field experiments to assess the mobilization effects of non-partisan mailers. However, little work has examined whether partisan mailers affect voters as intended. We report findings from two field experiments conducted in cooperation with partisan campaign strategists that allow us to assess the effects of negative and positive mailers. We find that mailers can affect voters - particularly their recognition of candidate names and their intent to turn out to vote. Notably, we find evidence that both negative and positive mailers stimulate intent to turn out.
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The Let Down Effect: Satisfaction, Motivation, and Credibility Assessments of Political Infotainment
Nicholas Browning & Kaye Sweetser
American Behavioral Scientist, May 2014, Pages 810-826
Abstract:
Using experimental design, this study compares first-time voters' gratifications and uses of a traditional News format with the increasingly popular fake news format. The data here found that while indeed young people may have initially assessed a greater level of gratification associated with the fake news genre, the group was significantly "let down" after exposure to such a program. Though first-time voters understand that traditional surveillance-type information-seeking activities are better associated with traditional News, they were ambivalent about approaching and avoiding both traditional News and fake news genres.
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Negativity, Information, and Candidate Position-Taking
John Geer & Lynn Vavreck
Political Communication, Spring 2014, Pages 218-236
Abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of how negativity affects voters' assessments of the positions candidates take on issues. We argue that the inferences people make about candidates' positions on issues differ depending on whether the information they encounter comes from attack or self-promotional statements. Specifically, we posit that attacks offer two pieces of information to voters - insight into the positions of the target and the sponsor - whereas, positive information only affects perceptions of the sponsor. Further, we contend that attacks offer important correctives to candidates' often misleading self-promotional claims. By drawing attention to the differences between the informational content of negative and positive appeals, we offer new insights into the inferences voters make about candidates' positions on issues. We support these claims using data from an internet-based experiment employing a nationally representative sample of nearly 4,000 people. The paper concludes by teasing out a series of implications that arise from these insights.
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The Impact of Candidate Name Order on Election Outcomes in North Dakota
Eric Chen et al.
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
A number of studies have explored the possibility that the ordering of candidates' names on the ballot might influence how those candidates perform on election day. Strong evidence of an order effect comes from investigations of election returns in states that implemented quasi-random assignment of candidate name orders to voters. Although most such studies have identified benefits for earlier-listed candidates, much of the evidence comes from a limited set of elections in only handful of states. This paper expands our understanding of order effects to 31 general elections held in North Dakota between 2000 and 2006; these include all state-wide races involving 2-candidates. In an extension of prior studies, a primacy effect appeared in 80% of the contests. The first ballot position reaped the largest benefits in non-partisan contests and in presidential election years. These findings are consistent with earlier studies from other states and provide evidence in line with proposals that a lack of information and ambivalence underlie candidate name order effects.
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Moderators of Candidate Name-Order Effects in Elections: An Experiment
Nuri Kim, Jon Krosnick & Daniel Casasanto
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past studies of elections have shown that candidates whose names were listed at the beginning of a list on a ballot often received more votes by virtue of their position. This article tests speculations about the cognitive mechanisms that might be responsible for producing the effect. In an experiment embedded in a large national Internet survey, participants read about the issue positions of two hypothetical candidates and voted for one of them in a simulated election in which candidate name order was varied. The expected effect of position appeared and was strongest (1) when participants had less information about the candidates on which to base their choices, (2) when participants felt more ambivalent about their choices, (3) among participants with more limited cognitive skills, and (4) among participants who devoted less effort to the candidate evaluation process. The name-order effect was greater among left-handed people when the candidate names were arrayed horizontally, but there was no difference between left- and right-handed people when the names were arrayed vertically. These results reinforce some broad theoretical accounts of the cognitive process that yield name-order effects in elections.