The running game
Gender Roles, Work-Life Balance, and Running for Office
Rachel Silbermann
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Spring 2015, Pages 123-153
Abstract:
Political scientists have studied why so few women run for office in the United States, but explanations concerning the challenge of balancing work and life have received little empirical support. I present two forms of data to show how expectations about work-life balance affect the supply of potential women politicians. The common thread in these analyses is that time spent traveling to and from work is particularly burdensome for those who spend time caring for children. Because women do a majority of the child care and housework, commuting is particularly burdensome to women. Analyzing a novel data set, I find that women are less likely to run for state legislative office in districts further from state capitals. I validate these results with an original survey experiment run on undergraduates in the midst of choosing their own careers. I find that female students weigh proximity to home twice as heavily as male students do in a hypothetical decision of whether to run for higher office. These results suggest that equal representation of women in government would require men and women to share household responsibilities more equally.
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Objectivity and Information Bias in Campaign News
Johanna Dunaway et al.
Journal of Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines whether objective campaign news stories — defined here as those with equitable tone toward 2 competing candidates — are less informative than slanted stories favoring one candidate over the other. Using a large news content dataset composed of campaign news stories from statewide elections in 2004, 2006, and 2008, we measure news story quality 6 different ways. It is modeled as a function of differences in story tone toward opposing candidates and a host of other news outlet and electoral characteristics known to influence the nature and type of information in campaign news. We find that slant is positively related to the likelihood that news articles focus on substance, issues, and include sourced content.
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Politically hyperactive? The civic participation of American Jews
Kenneth Wald
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although American Jews are often perceived as extremely active if not hyperpolitical, scholars have seldom studied the degree to which Jews in the US actually participate in public life. In a statistical sense, Jews are overrepresented in some domains that tend to favor groups with substantial socioeconomic resources (although these participation differences tend to disappear or diminish in multivariate models). This paper examines another major form of participation – civic activism – that research has suggested is less responsive to socioeconomic resources and thus might provide a more neutral venue to assess comparative Jewish engagement in the public square. Using Roper surveys from 1989–1992 with a sample of Jews and a comparison sample of non-Jews selected by propensity matching, I find that Jews are less likely to engage in civic activities than comparable non-Jews, suggesting that the reputation of Jews for political hyperactivity is considerably over-stated.
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Candy Elasticity: Halloween Experiments on Public Political Statements
Julian Jamison & Dean Karlan
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We conducted experiments during trick-or-treating on Halloween in a predominantly liberal neighborhood in the weeks preceding the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. We decorated one side of a house porch with McCain material in 2008 (Romney material in 2012) and the other side with Obama material. Children were asked to choose a side, with half receiving the same candy on either side and half receiving more candy to go to the McCain/Romney side. This yields a “candy elasticity” of children's political support. Results vary by age: children ages nine and older were two to three times more likely to choose the Republican candidate when offered double candy for voting Republican compared to when offered equal candy, whereas children ages eight and under were particularly sticky and did not waver in their choice of candidate despite the offer of double candy.
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Political Advertising and Election Outcomes
Jörg Spenkuch & David Toniatti
Northwestern University Working Paper, May 2015
Abstract:
We propose a new approach for estimating the persuasive effects of political advertising. Our empirical strategy exploits FCC regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties. Applying this approach to uniquely detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership patterns during the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, our results indicate that total political advertising has virtually no impact on aggregate turnout. The point estimates are precise enough to rule out even moderately sized effects. By contrast, we find a positive and economically meaningful effect of advertising on candidates' vote shares. Evidence from a regression discontinuity design with millions of observations shows that advertising's impact on elections is largely due to compositional changes of the electorate.
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Monica Schneider et al.
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide a novel approach to understanding the political ambition gap between men and women by examining perceptions of the role of politician. Across three studies, we find that political careers are viewed as fulfilling power-related goals, such as self-promotion and competition. We connect these goals to a tolerance for interpersonal conflict and both of these factors to political ambition. Women's lack of interest in conflict and power-related activities mediates the relationship between gender and political ambition. In an experiment, we show that framing a political career as fulfilling communal goals — and not power-related goals — reduces the ambition gap.
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Why women don’t run: Experimental evidence on gender differences in political competition aversion
Jessica Preece & Olga Stoddard
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women's underrepresentation in leadership positions has been well documented, but the reasons behind it are not well understood. We carry out a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition: women's higher aversion to competitive environments. Using politics as a context for our study, we employ two distinct subject pools – highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market. We find that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women's interest in political office, but not on men's interest, hence significantly increasing the gender gap in leadership ambition.
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Tatishe Nteta, Rebecca Lisi & Melinda Tarsi
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
In The Race Card (2001), Tali Mendelberg claims that once the racial content of an implicit racial appeal has been exposed the appeal loses its ability to mobilize voters. In this paper, we investigate this claim by employing a survey experiment embedded in Amazon's Mechanical Turk in which respondents view Mitt Romney's “Right Choice” television ad on welfare and then read a short op-ed. The op-ed, written by a fictitious member of Congress whose partisanship was systematically varied, argues that the Romney ad (1) is racist or (2) has no racial undertones. In line with Mendelberg's predictions, we find that – regardless of the partisanship of the elite in question – exposure to an op-ed that denounces the Romney welfare advertisement as racist leads white Democrats and Republicans to more strongly perceive the advertisement as racist and express greater opposition to Romney's campaign. Our findings contribute to the literatures on racial priming and partisan motivated reasoning, and also make a strong case for further evaluating the influence of political leadership on racial attitudes.
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The Regulation of Political Finance and Corruption
Avi Ben-Bassat & Momi Dahan
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) database on political finance regulations for 82 countries, we found that a contribution limits index increased corruption, after controlling for a standard list of explanatory variables. This result remains consistent employing an array of robustness checks intended to minimize the risk of a bias due to potential reverse causality and endogeneity. In contrast, the level of perceived corruption is lower in countries with higher indices of public funding and transparency requirements but these effects are rarely significant. Interestingly, we show that the mix of more generous public funding and less stringent regulations of private contributions is associated with lower corruption.
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Looking for Two-sided Coattail Effects: Integrated Parties and Multilevel Elections in the U.S.
Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga & Ege Ozen
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the context of the American federalism, integrated parties provide the necessary coordination mechanism for state and federal politicians to be electorally successful. This argument rests on the assumption that voters are able to observe the benefits of voting a straight ticket. We test this individual level explanation by using the CCES data. Moreover, at the aggregate level, we measure the so-called ‘two-sided’ coattail effects in concurrent multilevel elections in the U.S. since 1960. By using a simultaneous equation model, we estimate the reciprocal relationship between presidential and gubernatorial vote shares at the state level. While we find no consistent presidential coattails, we reveal robust and significant gubernatorial coattail effects on state-level presidential vote, underscoring the role of multilevel forces within parties in democratic federations.
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Razor's Edge: The Politics of Facial Hair
Rebekah Herrick, Jeanette Morehouse Mendez & Ben Pryor
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This article argues that whether male candidates have facial hair has political implications. We argue that facial hair makes men appear overly masculine, having strong support for use of violence and little support for feminist views, which makes them less attractive candidates for women and feminists. Further, we argue that these perceptions are likely accurate.
Methods: Using a survey of college-age subjects, the research generally supports this theory.
Results: Men with facial hair are seen as more masculine, as well as more conservative on feminist issues, and women and feminists are less likely to vote for them. Further, we find perceptions of masculinity mediate the effects of facial hair on voters’ perceptions of them and willingness to vote for them. However, candidates with facial hair are seen as less supportive of use of force and these perceptions are not accurate based on members’ roll-call votes.
Conclusion: This article indicates that male candidates send a signal to voters about their masculinity by their choice of whether to shave.
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Deception and Political Participation: Theory and Laboratory Evidence
Daniel Houser, Sandra Ludwig & Thomas Stratmann
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
We model two-candidate elections in which (1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and (2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare between political campaigns with truthful advertising and campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our model predicts that voters should vote in-line with an advertisement's information. We test our model's predictions using laboratory elections. We find, in the presence of even a small probability that an advertisement is deceptive, voters become substantially more likely to elect a “low-quality” candidate. We discuss implications of this for existing models of voting decisions.
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Local Economic Gains from Primary Election Spending
Rebecca Lessem & Carly Urban
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper asks how government and private consumption spending affect earnings in service sectors. To do this, we exploit the variation across states and time in the money spent while campaigning for a party's Presidential primary nomination. We create a novel dataset combining the date each state held its primary from 1976-2008, the date in each election cycle in which only one candidate remained, and quarterly state earnings by sector. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find that hosting a primary election increases earnings, particularly in the retail and accommodations sectors. These results remain consistent when using data on primary campaign expenditures across states in the 2004 and 2008 elections.
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Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Links Social Impressions to Political Choices
Chenjie Xia et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 3 June 2015, Pages 8507-8514
Abstract:
Recent studies of political behavior suggest that voting decisions can be influenced substantially by “first-impression” social attributions based on physical appearance. Separate lines of research have implicated the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in the judgment of social traits on the one hand and economic decision-making on the other, making this region a plausible candidate for linking social attributions to voting decisions. Here, we asked whether OFC lesions in humans disrupted the ability to judge traits of political candidates or affected how these judgments influenced voting decisions. Seven patients with lateral OFC damage, 18 patients with frontal damage sparing the lateral OFC, and 53 matched healthy participants took part in a simulated election paradigm, in which they voted for real-life (but unknown) candidates based only on photographs of their faces. Consistent with previous work, attributions of “competence” and “attractiveness” based on candidate appearance predicted voting behavior in the healthy control group. Frontal damage did not affect substantially the ability to make competence or attractiveness judgments, but patients with damage to the lateral OFC differed from other groups in how they applied this information when voting. Only attractiveness ratings had any predictive power for voting choices after lateral OFC damage, whereas other frontal patients and healthy controls relied on information about both competence and attractiveness in making their choice. An intact lateral OFC may not be necessary for judgment of social traits based on physical appearance, but it seems to be crucial in applying this information in political decision-making.