Franchisee
Traci Burch
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 1-26
Abstract:
This paper re-examines the impact of Florida's disfranchisement law on the 2000 Presidential election. The analysis simulates outcomes in Florida under scenarios consistent with the turnout rates of Georgia and North Carolina ex-felons in 2000 and Florida ex-felons in 2008. Survey evidence on candidate preferences as well as data on ex-felon party registration in Florida and North Carolina are used to produce estimates of support for Bush and Gore among ex-felons. Based on the simulations, the ex-felon population in Florida would have favored Bush in 2000. Assuming that ex-felons supported Gore at rates similar to GSS respondents with at most a high school diploma, Bush would have defeated Gore by 4,925 and 7,048 votes, assuming turnout of 10 and 15%, respectively.
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Can Voter ID Laws Be Administered in a Race-Neutral Manner? Evidence from the City of Boston in 2008
Rachael Cobb, James Greiner & Kevin Quinn
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, March 2012, Pages 1-33
Abstract:
Is it feasible in the current United States to administer voter identification laws in a race-neutral manner? We study this question using rigorous field methods and state-of-the-art statistical techniques, thus accounting for sources of uncertainty (including survey non-response and clustering) that previous studies ignore. We conduct a sensitivity analysis to account for voters who were legally required to have been asked for ID under federal and state law. We conduct an experiment with a training program that clarified proper ID law administration. Finally, we study a jurisdiction and an election in which administration of ID laws was unlikely to pose issues of racial difference, and in which (under the law) the decision to request an ID was nondiscretionary. We find strong evidence that Hispanic and black voters were asked for identification at higher rates than white voters, even after adjusting for a number of other factors. The magnitudes of the differences are significant. We explore the theoretical and legal consequences of our findings.
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Jessica Link et al.
Election Law Journal, March 2012, Pages 52-69
Abstract:
The majority of U.S. states have constitutional language, statutes, or court decisions that if applied as worded, could bar individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) from voting. Here, we investigate the difference between the voting competence and political knowledge of individuals with TBI and that of "average" college students using measures of voting capacity and election-specific political knowledge. We recruited 14 individuals with TBI who are participating in a larger study on the relationship between disability and political participation at Carolinas Medical Center. We compared their responses to healthy controls (HC) (students at a large public university in North Carolina; n=22) on voting competency and political knowledge using the Competency Assessment Tool for Voting (designed by Appelbaum, Bonnie, and Karlawish), as well as measures of 2008 election information and questions drawn from the United States Citizen and Immigration Services citizenship exam. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare election-specific knowledge of persons with TBI and HCs. We find that those with TBI scored similarly to the healthy controls on competence to vote and election-specific knowledge. We conclude suffrage laws should not be based on overly broad, general assumptions regarding the cognitive capacity of citizens, but on whether or not they express a desire to vote.
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The Twenty-Sixth Amendment Enforcement Power
Eric Fish
Yale Law Journal, March 2012, Pages 1168-1235
Abstract:
This Note argues that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment did more than just lower the voting age. It also gave Congress the power to override state policies that disproportionately burden the voting rights of particular age groups, such as strict voter ID laws and onerous absentee ballot rules for overseas soldiers. The Note reasons from the Amendment's text and history, focusing on how the Twenty-Sixth Amendment parallels the Reconstruction Amendments, and how the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was generated by the political and jurisprudential battle over the Voting Rights Act. The Note also considers how a stronger Twenty-Sixth Amendment fits into current constitutional law.
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The Poverty of Participation: Self-Interest, Student Loans, and Student Activism
Joshua Ozymy
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 103-116
Abstract:
Political scientists maintain that self-interest should motivate political participation; however, empirical verification of the self-interest motive for participating is rare. Self-interested activism among the less-affluent is shown to be even more uncommon. Results of the present study suggest that when lower-income college students have resources and increased self-interest motives to act, not only do they choose to participate, they do so at higher levels than their more affluent peers. Utilizing policy-motivated activism (defined as voting, contributing, and contacting officials) with respect to student loans, the analysis suggests that the probability of contacting increases among student borrowers as their income decreases. Results suggest that lower-income borrowers are more likely to participate out of concern for the program than their higher-income counterparts, and self-interest explains the behavior.
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Christopher Magee
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This article seeks to explain the puzzle of why incumbents spend so much on campaigns despite most research finding that their spending has almost no effect on voters.
Methods: The article uses ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and fixed-effects regression to estimate the impact of incumbent spending on election outcomes. The estimation includes an interaction term between incumbent and challenger spending to allow the effect of incumbent spending to depend on the level of challenger spending.
Results: The estimation provides strong evidence that spending by the incumbent has a larger positive impact on votes received the more money the challenger spends.
Conclusion: Campaign spending by incumbents is most valuable in the races where the incumbent faces a serious challenge. Raising large sums of money to be used in close races is thus a rational choice by incumbents.
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Sweating the Vote: Heat and Abstention in the US House of Representatives
Alexander Cohen
PS: Political Science & Politics, January 2012, Pages 74-77
Abstract:
Several recent studies noted systematic links between weather conditions and voting turnout amid the mass public. This article extends this logic to the elite level by exploring the relationship between summer heat and abstentions in the US House of Representatives. In controlled multivariate regressions, heat is a significant predictor of abstentions across all votes held between 1991 and 2000. This finding provides new insight into legislative behavior as well as the motivation behind some abstentions, which could inform the understanding of the literature on legislative shirking.
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Candidate preferences and expectations of election outcomes
Adeline Delavande & Charles Manski
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 6 March 2012, Pages 3711-3715
Abstract:
Analysis of data from the American Life Panel shows that in the presidential election of 2008 and in multiple statewide elections in 2010, citizens exhibited large differences in their expectations of election outcomes. Expectations were strongly positively associated with candidate preferences, persons tending to believe that their preferred candidate is more likely to win the election. Committed supporters of opposing candidates regularly differed by 20-30% in their assessments of the likelihood that each candidate would win. These findings contribute evidence on the false consensus effect, the empirical regularity that own preferences tend to be positively associated with perceptions of social preferences. We used unique measures of preferences and perceptions that enabled respondents to express uncertainty flexibly. We studied a setting that would a priori seem inhospitable to false consensus - one where persons have little private information on social preferences but substantial common knowledge provided by media reports of election polls.
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The Conditional Effects of Competing Messages during Presidential Nominating Conventions
Joseph Cera & Aaron Weinschenk
Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2012, Pages 161-175
Abstract:
Past research demonstrates that presidential nominating conventions can exercise multiple effects on individual-level opinion; consumption of convention speeches yields opinion more favorable to the convening candidate, while exposure to partisan messaging in the surrounding information environment can trigger a general partisan bias. In this article, we demonstrate that the persuasive power of speeches made by candidates during the second convention in a given election cycle can be attenuated by exposure to information from the initial convention. Such conditional effects persist even when individual partisan affiliation and preconvention opinion are controlled. Notably, positive impressions made by candidates appear to be more impactful than negative messaging aimed at candidates by their opposition.
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Voting at 16: Turnout and the Quality of Vote Choice
Markus Wagner, David Johann & Sylvia Kritzinger
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Critics of giving citizens under 18 the right to vote argue that such teenagers lack the ability and motivation to participate effectively in elections. If this argument is true, lowering the voting age would have negative consequences for the quality of democracy. We test the argument using survey data from Austria, the only European country with a voting age of 16 in nation-wide elections. While the turnout levels of young people under 18 are relatively low, their failure to vote cannot be explained by a lower ability or motivation to participate. In addition, the quality of these citizens' choices is similar to that of older voters, so they do cast votes in ways that enable their interests to be represented equally well. These results are encouraging for supporters of a lower voting age.
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Who loses in direct democracy?
Ryan Moore & Nirmala Ravishankar
Social Science Research, May 2012, Pages 646-656
Abstract:
We examine the success of California's black, Latino, and Asian voters in ballot proposition elections, showing that minority voters lose more often than whites across all ballot propositions, and that this disadvantage is not limited to a small subset of racially-targeted propositions. Minority voters are 2-5 percentage points less likely than otherwise-similar white voters to be on the winning side of ballot propositions. These differences persist after excluding racially-targeted propositions because minority voters are more likely to lose on several issues including elections, the environment, health, housing, taxes, and transportation. We demonstrate that race is more important than class in describing which voters lose.
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Lorenzo Brusattin
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Spring 2012, Pages 1-20
Abstract:
An experiment was designed to ascertain if political sophistication helps the voter focus on the available information about the ideology of candidates as opposed to drawing inferences on the candidates' personality based on their photos. With this purpose in mind, 937 participants in a web questionnaire were presented with two unknown hypothetical candidates and were asked to vote for one of them. Information on the candidates was presented (and successively manipulated) in the fashion of electoral posters showing both the candidates' pictures as well as a set of policy statements. According to the findings, the photograph of a candidate significantly influences voter behavior at the ballot box. Moreover, a higher level of political sophistication does not prevent or reduce the possibility that such visual information may have a bearing on a candidate's electoral success.
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Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization
Michele Claibourn & Paul Martin
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 27-56
Abstract
We investigate how material and symbolic campaign appeals may motivate segments of the electorate to be more engaged with the unfolding presidential campaign; this engagement is a first step toward bringing these populations into an electoral coalition. We pair two massive new data collections - the National Annenberg Election Study capturing public opinion across an entire campaign and The Wisconsin Advertising Project recording and cataloging the political commercials aired by campaigns - to examine how the candidates' choice of issues affects who gets into the game. We find evidence that appeals to symbolic interests are more likely than appeals to material interest to selectively engage targeted groups.
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The 'culture of honor' in citizens' concepts of their duty as voters
Jonathan Baron
Rationality and Society, February 2012, Pages 37-72
Abstract:
Web studies explored citizens' concepts of their duty as voters and their choices concerning actual policies. Some people see a moral duty to support their group (their nation) regardless of harmful effects on outsiders. One study supports the hypothesis that this duty avoids betrayal of the nation, which they see as granting the right to vote for the purpose of advancing national interest. Some also see a duty to defend their self-interest through voting; many think this is a rational way to pursue their interests. Another justification is, "If [the voter] does not look out for her own interests, nobody else will." I hypothesize a norm of responsibility for self-defense, part of the "culture of honor" (Cohen and Nisbett, 1994) in all of us. Yet politics is by design an inefficient way to pursue self-interest, although it is efficient for advancing the good of all.
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The Impact of Ballot Type on Voter Errors
Paul Herrnson, Michael Hanmer & Richard Niemi
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Studies of ballots have traditionally focused on roll-off, candidate order, and partisan advantage. This study is among the first to assess the impact of ballots on individual-level voter errors. We develop new hypotheses by bringing together theoretical insights from usability research and political science about the effects of ballots with and without a straight-party voting option. By comparing voters' intentions to the votes they cast, we are able to create two measures of voter errors: votes unintentionally cast for the wrong candidate and unintentional undervotes. Voters generally make fewer errors of both types when using a standard office-bloc ballot than when using an office-bloc ballot with a straight-party option, with the number of wrong-candidate errors substantially exceeding the number of unintentional undervotes. Voters' background characteristics have a significant impact on their ability to vote without error. Our results offer a new perspective for evaluating the use of the straight-party option.
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The Impact of Petition Signing on Voter Turnout
Janine Parry, Daniel Smith & Shayne Henry
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 117-136
Abstract:
Generally speaking, campaign-related contact motivates voters. One form of such contact not much explored in the voter mobilization literature is the petitioning for ballot initiatives that occurs with considerable frequency in about half the states and even more localities. Using newly-available data that allow us to match individual petition signers with their subsequent election behavior, we explore the role of having had a hand in a ballot measure's qualifying stage in propelling individual voters to the polls. Specifically, we perform multivariate analysis on a random sample of 1,000 registered Arkansas voters, 1,100 registered Florida voters, and all 71,119 registered voters in Gainesville, Florida to measure the influence of petition-signing in spurring voter turnout. We find marginal effects in the statewide samples, but substantial and significant turnout effects in the Gainesville municipal election - an off-cycle, low-profile election. Furthermore, the effect of petition-signing - across all of our samples - is strongest among irregular, as compared to habitual, voters. These findings are in keeping with recent campaign mobilization experimental research and comport with previous findings on the "educative effects" of ballot measures on voter turnout.
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John Gibson et al.
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to measure these costs accurately, outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New Zealand. We calculate distance and travel time by road from the place of residence to the nearest polling place and combine our time estimate with imputed wages for all sample members. Using this new measure of the opportunity cost of voting to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small increases in the opportunity costs of time can have large effects in reducing voter turnout.
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Citizen Involvement & Quality of Life: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in a Time of Direct Democracy
Ryan Yonk & Shauna Reilly
Applied Research in Quality of Life, March 2012, Pages 1-16
Abstract:
This paper explores the connection between quality of life and direct democracy. Using state level data for participation and quality of life, we find that those states with a high quality of life see higher participation in direct democracy than those with lower quality of life. However, the passage of direct democracy measures has the inverse relationship indicating the importance of maintaining the status quo for states with higher quality of life measurements.