Competing for Democracy
Field Experiments Invoking Gloating Villains to Increase Voter Participation: Anger, Anticipated Emotions, and Voting Turnout
Gregory Huber et al.
British Journal of Political Science, August 2025
Abstract:
In two field experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida, we present novel evidence about how emotions can be harnessed to increase voter turnout. When we inform respondents that a partisan villain would be happy if they did not vote (for example, a Gloating Villain treatment), we find that anger is activated in comparison to other emotions and turnout increases by 1.7 percentage points. In a subsequent field experiment, we benchmark this treatment to a standard GOTV message, the social pressure treatment. Using survey experiments that replicate our field experimental treatments, we show that our treatment links the act of voting to anticipated anger. In doing so, we contribute the first in-the-field evidence of how we can induce emotions, which are commonly understood to be fleeting states, to shape temporally distant political behaviours such as voting.
Losers’ Conspiracy: Elections and Conspiracism
Joanne Miller, Christina Farhart & Kyle Saunders
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elections produce winners and losers. Winners reap the benefits; losers have to dust themselves off. How each side chooses to respond has important implications for democratic stability. Winners may attempt to develop post-election narratives in such a way as to claim a mandate and consolidate power. But losers are even more likely to be motivated to search for an explanation -- a narrative that not only explains the loss in a self-esteem preserving way but also provides guidance for how to engage (or not) in the future to avoid subsequent losses. Building on extant research on the winner-loser gap in political attitudes, we theorize that electoral losers will be more conspiratorial (as assessed by a general measure of conspiracism) after the election than before the election. We report the results of five nationally representative pre/post-election panel surveys spanning three election years in the U.S. (2016, 2018, 2020) that provide strong and consistent support for the “losers’ conspiracism” hypothesis and discuss the implications of our findings.
The Voting Wars: Public Opinion About Battles Over Voting Rules
Ryan Claassen & Michael Ensley
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The voting wars rank among the most rancorous and active partisan battles in an era defined by extreme partisan animus. The current battle lines formed decades ago, but neither party has a monopoly on protecting voting rights or preventing fraud. Instead we theorize partisan positions in voting wars reflect beliefs about assembling winning coalitions. Sometimes elections are won by turning out supporters and sometimes elections are won by preventing opponents from voting. Which brings us to the current conventional wisdom about turnout: the Democrats would win if everyone voted. The turnout myth is as strong as it is flawed and we investigate whether it is at the heart of the current voting wars. The turnout myth has received extensive scholarly attention, but public belief in the myth has never been examined nor has its role in public attitudes about restrictive voting laws. Toward that end we fielded a series of surveys with new measures of belief in the turnout myth. We find that Democrats’ turnout myth beliefs shape their positions on restrictive voting laws, but Republican support for restrictive voting rules is dominated by beliefs that voting fraud is a major problem. In addition to beliefs having different effects, further analyses reveal vast partisan differences in beliefs as well. Protecting the integrity of American elections will require finding common cause among partisans with very different beliefs and motivations.
Heterogeneity of shifts in economic expectations around elections
Paul Niekamp
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses the Survey of Consumer Expectations to study the effects of the 2016 and 2020 US elections on economic expectations. I find that Trump's 2016 election victory elicited broad-based improvements in US stock price and debt expectations, transcending the “winning team.” Aggregate expectations of a US debt level decrease more than doubled. While stronger for white individuals, improvements were distributed across demographics, including predicted Democrat voters, except black individuals. I find no evidence that Biden's 2020 election victory elicited improvements in expectations of the “winning team.” Aggregate stock market expectations decreased and individuals anticipated a higher unemployment rate.
The Information Landscape and Voters’ Understanding of Ranked Choice Voting in Alaska
Joseph Anthony et al.
Election Law Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 2020, Alaska voters approved a ballot measure that implemented ranked choice voting (RCV) in statewide elections, state legislative contests, as well as Congressional races. The 2022 election was the first cycle in which voters and election officials experienced voting using RCV rules. This article analyzes election results in Alaska from 2014 through 2022 to assess whether the shift to RCV substantially increased voter confusion. This article also examines the information landscape surrounding the RCV elections, including how Alaskan organizations and newspapers communicated with voters about the new 2022 rules. We use data gathered from newspaper coverage surrounding the election as well as from interviews conducted with organizational stakeholders to understand key messages delivered to the public. Finally, we note that Alaska provides unique opportunities to analyze RCV understanding in minority constituencies. We find that compared with previous elections in Alaska, rates of ballot errors slightly decreased in the first top four primary elections and slightly increased in the RCV general elections of 2022. In general, we do not observe unusually high levels of ballot error in the 2022 Alaska elections. Voters made fuller use of the RCV rules in areas with greater news coverage of the new voting system, and voters seemed to mimic the posture of their preferred candidates toward RCV. We attribute these results in part to the concerted efforts on the part of organizations and election officials to educate voters about the new system.
Parents, Peers and Political Participation: Social Influence among Roommates
Brad Gomez & Matthew Pietryka
British Journal of Political Science, August 2025
Abstract:
Political participation has long been viewed as a social act. But the influence of social relationships on participation is often impossible to disentangle from the factors that select people into these relationships. To overcome this challenge, we study randomly assigned college roommates, thus reducing these selection biases and other confounds. We examine short-run social influence of roommates on voter participation in 2016 and longer-term effects in the 2018 and 2020 elections. We collected consent from over 2,000 first-year students, allowing us to obtain a matched voter file indicating which students voted and the public voting histories of students’ parents, an indicator of students’ pre-college political environment socialization. Our evidence suggests that roommates’ influence on turnout decisions rivals the association between students’ turnout and that of their parents. Yet this parity masks gender differences. For women, the effect of roommates is larger. For men, the student-parent association exceeds the roommate effect.
General Laws and the Emergence of Durable Political Parties: The Case of Pennsylvania
Naomi Lamoreaux & John Joseph Wallis
NBER Working Paper, August 2025
Abstract:
In previous work we have highlighted the importance of revisions to state constitutions that mandated that laws be general and uniform throughout the state. Indiana (in 1851) was the first state to adopt a general-law mandate, but most other states followed suit by the end of the century -- most of them in the 1870s. This paper focuses on Pennsylvania, one of the states that made the change in the 1870s. We show that the movement to revise the state constitution was led by Republican party bosses seeking to suppress factional strife they thought was threatening their party’s dominance and perhaps even its existence. Their effort succeeded. We argue that it was the shift to general laws in Pennsylvania and other states that led to the emergence of a party system in the United States dominated by two durable political organizations.
When Does Fame Not Matter? Examining Gender Differences in Politicians’ Social Media Experiences
Maarja Lühiste et al.
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research alerts to the increasingly unpleasant climate surrounding public debate on social media. Female politicians, in particular, are reporting serious attacks targeted at them. Yet, research offers inconclusive insights regarding the gender gap in online incivility. This paper aims to address this gap by comparing politicians with varying levels of prominence and public status in different institutional contexts. Using a machine learning approach for analyzing over 23 million tweets addressed to politicians in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we find little consistent evidence of a gender gap in the proportion of incivility. However, more prominent politicians are considerably and consistently more likely than others to receive uncivil attacks. While prominence influences US male and female politicians’ probability to receive uncivil tweets the same way, women in our European sample receive incivility regardless of their status. Most importantly, the incivility varies in quality and across contexts, with women, especially in more plurality contexts, receiving more identity-based attacks than other politicians.
Vicarious kin derogation -- when and why people mock the innocent family members of political leaders
Simone Tang & Kurt Gray
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2025
Abstract:
Despite the widespread human aversion to harming the innocent, people often mock or attack the children and spouses of public figures they dislike, a pattern we call vicarious kin derogation (VKD). Targeting the vulnerable kin of powerful figures has been used to inflict psychological pain, from ancient China to modern-day North Korea, to social media in the West. Six studies explore VKD with both experimental and field data. Across 562,066 tweets directed at US presidential candidates, people derogate politicians' loved ones when those loved ones seem more emotionally vulnerable than the candidate themselves (Study 1). In experiments, people engage in VKD when a politician seems more emotionally affected by attacks on family than on himself (Studies 2 and 4), and when people are motivated to inflict suffering on the public figure (Study 5). At the same time, people are less likely to endorse VKD when reminded that it targets innocent individuals (Studies 3 and 5). Together, these studies reveal a central psychological tension: VKD is satisfying when it seems to hurt an otherwise invulnerable leader, but people still dislike harming the innocent. This dynamic helps explain a persistent, toxic feature of modern political discourse: when people seek to harm public figures by attacking their loved ones.