Polls Show
Are U.S. Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context
Lucian Conway & Alivia Zubrod
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are U.S. political leaders becoming simpler in their rhetoric? To evaluate, we place the two most recent Presidents' integrative complexity against a historical context for three different types of comparable materials. Results reveal that both Biden and Trump are simple when compared to the typical President. Further, segmented regression analyses reveal Biden's and Trump's low complexity is partially the continuation of an ongoing historical decline in complexity among Presidents. Importantly, this complexity decline is occurring for both Republicans and Democrats.
No Balance, No Problem: Evidence of Partisan Voting in the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate Runoffs
Carlos Algara, Isaac Hale & Cory Struthers
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent work on American presidential elections suggests that voters engage in anticipatory balancing, which occurs when voters split their ticket in order to moderate collective policy outcomes by forcing agreement among institutions controlled by opposing parties. We use the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs, which determined whether Democrats would have unified control of the federal government given preceding November victories by President-elect Biden and House Democrats, to evaluate support for anticipatory balancing. Leveraging an original survey of Georgia voters, we find no evidence of balancing within the general electorate and among partisans across differing model specifications. We use qualitative content analysis of voter electoral runoff intentions to support our findings and contextualize the lack of evidence for balancing with an original analysis showing the unprecedented partisan nature of contemporary Senate elections since direct-election began in 1914.
When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble
Yaoyao Dai & Alexander Kustov
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some politicians employ populist rhetoric more than others within the same elections, and why do the same politicians employ more of it in some elections? Building on a simple formal theoretical model of two-candidate elections informed by the ideational approach to populist communication, we argue that the initially less popular political actors are more likely to use populist rhetoric in a gamble to have at least some chance of winning. To test the empirical implications of our argument, we construct the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches (1952-2016) and estimate the prevalence of populist rhetoric across these speeches with a novel automated text analysis method utilizing active learning and word embedding. Overall, we show the robustly greater use of populism among the presidential candidates with the lower polling numbers regardless of their partisanship or incumbency status.
Minority Underrepresentation in U.S. Cities
Federico Ricca & Francesco Trebbi
NBER Working Paper, February 2022
Abstract:
This paper investigates the patterns of Minority representation and voter registration in U.S. municipal governments. For the period 1981-2020, we report substantial levels of strategic underrepresentation of African American, Asian, and Latino voters in U.S. local politics. Disproportionality in the representation and in voter registration rates of Minority groups are widespread, but stronger when racial or ethnic minorities are electorally pivotal. Underrepresentation is determined by the combination of several endogenous institutional features, starting from systematic disparity in voter registration, strategic selection of electoral rules, city's form of government, council size, and pay of elected members of the council. We provide causal evidence of the strategic use of local political institutions in reducing electoral representation of minorities based on the U.S. Supreme Court narrow decision of Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which deemed unconstitutional Voting Rights Act (VRA) Section 4(b), removing federal preclearance requirements for a specific subset of U.S. jurisdictions.
Ranked-Choice Voting and the Potential for Improved Electoral Performance of Third-Party Candidates in America
Alan James Simmons, Manuel Gutierrez & John Transue
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Proponents of ranked-choice voting highlight a number of arguments for why such an approach to elections should be adopted. One major argument is that ranked-choice voting will encourage voters to support more third-party or independent candidates and break the electoral stranglehold of the two main parties in America. Considering approximately two-thirds of Americans want a third major party this argument may prove appealing to American voters, but there is currently no empirical evidence to support such claims. In this project, we explore a theory of why ranked-choice voting may increase voter support for third-party or independent candidates and test the argument that ranked-choice voting (RCV) will improve the fortunes of third-party candidates using a survey experiment. We find significant support for the claim that ranked-choice voting increases support for third-party candidates.
The Impact of Vote-By-Mail Policy on Turnout and Vote Share in the 2020 Election
Sharif Amlani & Samuel Collitt
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic spurred many states and counties to reduce public health risks by adopting policies that made voting by mail easier in the 2020 general election. Employing a two-period difference-in-difference research design, this article investigates how these policy changes affected turnout and presidential vote share. We find that counties that moved to send registered voters mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day experienced 2.6 percent higher turnout compared to counties that made no change, although lesser reforms may have hindered turnout. We also find no evidence that making voting by mail easier conferred a partisan advantage.
Causal Judgment in the Wild: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
Tadeg Quillien & Michael Barlev
Cognitive Science, February 2022
Abstract:
When explaining why an event occurred, people intuitively highlight some causes while ignoring others. How do people decide which causes to select? Models of causal judgment have been evaluated in simple and controlled laboratory experiments, but they have yet to be tested in a complex real-world setting. Here, we provide such a test, in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Across tens of thousands of simulations of possible election outcomes, we computed, for each state, an adjusted measure of the correlation between a Biden victory in that state and a Biden election victory. These effect size measures accurately predicted the extent to which U.S. participants (N = 207, preregistered) viewed victory in a given state as having caused Biden to win the presidency. Our findings support the theory that people intuitively select as causes of an outcome the factors with the largest standardized causal effect on that outcome across possible counterfactual worlds.
Trump and the Shifting Meaning of "Conservative": Using Activists' Pairwise Comparisons to Measure Politicians' Perceived Ideologies
Daniel Hopkins & Hans Noel
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although prior scholarship has made considerable progress in measuring politicians' positions, it has only rarely considered voters' or activists' perceptions of those positions. Here, we present a novel measure of U.S. senators' perceived ideologies derived from 9,030 pairwise comparisons elicited from party activists in three 2016 YouGov surveys. By focusing on activists, we study a most-likely case for perceiving within-party ideological distinctions. We also gain empirical leverage from Donald Trump's nomination and heterodox positions on some issues. Our measure of perceived ideology is correlated with NOMINATE but differs in informative ways: senators with very conservative voting records were sometimes perceived as less conservative if they did not support Trump. A confirmatory test shows these trends extended into 2021. Even among activists, perceived ideology appears to be anchored by prominent people as well as policy positions.
Pragmatic bias impedes women's access to political leadership
Christianne Corbett et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 February 2022
Abstract:
Progress toward gender equality is thwarted by the underrepresentation of women in political leadership, even as most Americans report they would vote for women candidates. Here, we hypothesize that women candidates are often disadvantaged by pragmatic bias, a tendency to withhold support for members of groups for whom success is perceived to be difficult or impossible to achieve. Across six studies (N = 7,895), we test whether pragmatic bias impedes women's access to a highly significant political leadership position-the US presidency. In two surveys, 2020 Democratic primary voters perceived women candidates to be less electable, and these beliefs were correlated with lower intentions to vote for women candidates (Studies 1 and 2). Voters identified many reasons women would be less electable than men, including others' unwillingness to vote for women, biased media coverage, and higher requirements to prove themselves. We next tested interventions to reduce pragmatic bias. Merely correcting misperceptions of Americans' reported readiness for a woman president did not increase intentions to vote for a woman (Study 3). However, across three experiments (including one preregistered on a nationally representative sample), presenting evidence that women earn as much support as men in US general elections increased Democratic primary voters' intentions to vote for women presidential candidates, an effect driven by heightened perceptions of these candidates' electability (Studies 4 to 6). These findings highlight that social change efforts can be thwarted by people's sense of what is possible, but this may be overcome by credibly signaling others' willingness to act collectively.
The Primary Path for Turning Legislative Effectiveness into Electoral Success
Sarah Treul et al.
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Effective lawmakers are the workhorses of the U.S. Congress, yet we know little about the electoral payoffs of their efforts. Are effective lawmakers better at warding off challengers in the next election? Do they win at a greater rate? To answer these questions, we draw on original data on congressional primary elections from 1980 to 2016, allowing us to focus on elections that lack partisan cues, and where voters tend to be highly knowledgeable about politics. We find that incumbents receive an electoral boost in congressional primaries from their legislative work in Congress. Ineffective lawmakers are more likely to face quality challengers, and they lose their primaries at a greater rate than do more effective lawmakers. These differences diminish in the complex informational environment of a primary with multiple challengers. These findings provide important insights into the conditions under which voters hold their elected representatives accountable for their legislative successes and failures.
Gender Stereotyping and the Electoral Success of Women Candidates: New Evidence from Local Elections in the United States
Sarah Anzia & Rachel Bernhard
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research shows that voters often use gender stereotypes to evaluate candidates, which should help women in some electoral contexts and hurt them in others. Yet, most research examines a single context at a time - usually US national elections, where partisanship is strong - and employs surveys and experiments, raising concerns that citizens' responses may not reflect how they actually vote. By analyzing returns from thousands of nonpartisan local elections, we test whether patterns of women's win rates relative to men's match expectations for how the electoral effects of gender stereotyping should vary by context. We find women have greater advantages over men in city council than mayoral races, still greater advantages in school board races, and decreasing advantages in more conservative constituencies. Thus, women fare better in stereotype-congruent contexts and worse in incongruent contexts. These effects are most pronounced during on-cycle elections, when voters tend to know less about local candidates.
Estimating Candidate Valence
Kei Kawai & Takeaki Sunada
NBER Working Paper, January 2022
Abstract:
We estimate valence measures for candidates running in U.S. House elections from data on vote shares. Our estimates control for endogeneity of campaign spending and sample selection of candidates due to endogenous entry. Our identification and estimation strategy builds on ideas developed for estimating production functions. We find that incumbents have substantially higher valence measures than challengers running against them, resulting in about 9.2 percentage-point differences in the vote share, on average. We find that open-seat challengers have higher valence measures than those running against incumbents by about 5.3 percentage points. Our measure of candidate valence can be used to study various substantive questions of political economy. We illustrate its usefulness by studying the source of incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections.
Social class predicts preference for competent politicians
Bennett Callaghan, Michael Kraus & John Dovidio
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Perceptions of interpersonal competence are an important predictor of success in the political domain. However, we provide evidence that competence is valued differently by individuals across the social class spectrum. Across two experiments (N1 = 441; N2 = 500), we found that voting-eligible participants of relatively higher social class expressed a greater likelihood than their lower-class counterparts of voting for a candidate embodying competence. Moreover, they were more likely to explicitly prefer such a candidate to one embodying warmth. Exploratory analyses suggest that these preferences were mediated by perceptions relating to self-interest and self-other similarity: compared to their lower-class counterparts, higher-class potential voters saw the competent candidate as more likely to care about people like them and as more interpersonally close. An internal meta-analysis suggested that these patterns of preference were unique to competent politicians and that they were meaningfully different from class-based patterns of preference for warm politicians. We conclude that competence, in the political domain, is distinctively appealing to higher-class individuals, and we discuss the implications of these findings for psychological theory, political participation, and the representativeness of the political system in general.
The Growth of Campaign Advertising in the U.S., 1880 to 1930
Shigeo Hirano et al.
Journal of Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
When did candidate-centered campaign advertising take off in the U.S., and what accounts for this growth? In this paper, we analyze a novel dataset of political advertisements in newspapers between 1880 and 1930. We show that there was a sharp increase in candidates' newspaper advertising beginning around 1910. We also exploit the panel structure of this data to investigate the impact of political reforms on advertising. The results suggest that the introduction of the direct primary substantially increased the number of campaign advertisements for candidates in general election races. They also suggest that the switch to non-partisan elections increased newspaper advertisements by candidates for judicial offices. We do not find similar effects for the Australian ballot. Finally, we also find little evidence that the reforms affected advertising in U.S. presidential races or by political parties.