Rock the Vote
Timothy Werner
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, supporters of campaign finance reform argued that American politics would soon be awash in corporate cash and that public policy outcomes would reflect the desires of big business. Using event study methodology to isolate the effect of Citizens United on firms' stock prices, this article finds that the financial markets did not share this view. Rather, key events in the case did not significantly affect the share prices of those large firms heavily engaged in and sensitive to politics, suggesting that investors expected the decision to have no effect on political and policy outcomes of concern to corporate America.
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Caitlin Fausey & Teenie Matlock
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The wording of political messages is known to affect voting behavior, including judgments about whether or not candidates will be elected. Yet the question remains whether voting behavior can be influenced by fine-grained grammatical details of political messages. In this paper, two studies examined how subtly different grammatical forms in descriptions of political candidates' past actions can affect attitudes about electability. Specifically, participants read about a senator who was seeking reelection and then indicated whether they thought the politician would be reelected. In Study 1, the senator had done either negative or positive actions, and these were described using imperfective (was VERB + ing) or perfective (VERB + ed) aspect. In Study 2, the senator had done a negative and a positive action, one of which was described using imperfective and the other with perfective aspect. Results revealed that imperfective descriptions of negative actions resulted in greater confidence that the candidate would not be reelected. Imperfective descriptions also led people to think that the candidate had done more negative action. When a negative and positive action were described together, grammar again influenced electability such that people reasoned in line with whatever action was highlighted by imperfective aspect. In both studies, subtle differences in grammar influenced whether people thought a political candidate would be reelected. These findings provide novel insights about how language can shape thought in the political realm.
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Jose Montalvo
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can terrorist attacks be timed to change the outcome of democratic elections? In this paper we analyze the electoral impact of the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid. Studies using individual level post-electoral survey data reach contradictory conclusions. We propose an alternative approach. Since the bombings took place only three days before the 2004 Congressional Election, we can find a control group of individuals who cast their vote before the terrorist attacks. The results indicate that the attacks had an important electoral impact, rejecting the hypothesis that the identity of the winner was unaffected by the terrorist attacks.
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The Continued Salience of Religious Voting in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain
Christopher Raymond
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom on party systems in advanced industrial democracies holds that modern electorates are dealigned and that social cleavages no longer structure party politics. Recent work on class cleavages has challenged this stylized fact. The analysis performed here extends this criticism to the religious-secular cleavage. Using path analysis and comparing the current electorates of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain with the early 1960s, this paper demonstrates that the religious-secular cleavage remains or has become a significant predictor of conservative vote choice. While the effects of the religious-secular cleavage on vote choice have become largely indirect, the total of the direct and indirect effects are substantial and equivalent to the effects of class and status.
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Foot Voting, Political Ignorance, and Constitutional Design
Ilya Somin
Social Philosophy and Policy, January 2011, Pages 202-227
Abstract:
The strengths and weaknesses of federalism have been debated for centuries. But one major possible advantage of building decentralization and limited government into a constitution has been largely ignored in the debate so far: its potential for reducing the costs of widespread political ignorance. The argument of this paper is simple, but has potentially important implications: Constitutional federalism enables citizens to "vote with their feet," and foot voters have much stronger incentives to make well-informed decisions than more conventional ballot box voters. The informational advantage of foot voting over ballot box voting suggests that decentralized federalism can increase citizen welfare and democratic accountability relative to policymaking in a centralized unitary state. Ballot box voters have strong incentives to be "rationally ignorant" about the candidates and policies they vote on because the chance that any one vote will have a decisive impact on an electoral outcome is vanishingly small. For the same reason, they also have little or no incentive to make good use of the information they do possess. By contrast, "foot voters" choosing a jurisdiction in which to reside have much stronger incentives to acquire information and use it rationally; the decisions they make are individually decisive.
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Eric Brunner, Stephen Ross & Ebonya Washington
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using California ballot proposition returns and exogenous shifts to labor demand, we provide the first large-scale causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on policy preferences. Consistent with economic theory, we find that positive economic shocks decrease support for redistributive policies. More notably, we find evidence of a need for cognitive consistency in voting behavior as economic shocks have a smaller significant impact on voting on non-economic ballot issues. While we also demonstrate that positive shocks decrease turnout, we present evidence that our results reflect changes to the electorate's preferences and not simply to its composition.
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Electoral Competition and the Frequency of Initiative Use in the U.S. States
Robert McGrath
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
To what extent has direct democracy, specifically the ballot initiative process, served to substitute for perceived deficiencies of representative democracy in the United States? Despite extensive literatures on both direct democracy and democratic representation, there exist very few direct evaluations of the interplay between the two. I examine whether variation in the frequency of a state's initiative use is related to the extent to which that state's representative institutions lack electoral competition. I find that initiative states with a higher percentage of uncontested elections for representative office see more initiative use than states with more competitive elections, conditional on the ideological divergence between citizens and legislators. The results contribute much to our understanding of the processes driving cycles of initiative use and identify a tangible consequence of the presence of misrepresentative state institutions.
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The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections
Benjamin Highton
Political Behavior, December 2010, Pages 453-471
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substantial influence of candidate issue contrast. Further, I find that leading hypotheses for the "resurgence in partisanship" are not consistent with some important facts suggesting that the explanation remains elusive.
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Yes we can! Valence politics and electoral choice in America, 2008
Harold Clarke et al.
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
The claim that the 2008 presidential election was a transformative one is fast becoming part of the "conventional wisdom" of American politics. Despite the election's undoubted significance, this paper argues that factors affecting voting decisions were strikingly similar to those operating in many previous presidential elections.Using data from the CCAP six-wave national election survey, we demonstrate that a valence politics model provides a powerful, parsimonious explanation of the ballot decisions Americans made in 2008. As is typical in presidential elections, candidate images had major effects on electoral choice. Controlling for several other relevant factors, racial attitudes were strongly associated with how voters reacted to the candidates. Other models of electoral choice, such as a Downsian issue-proximity model, are also relevant, but their explanatory power is considerably less than that provided by the valence politics model.
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Voters, Emotions, and Race in 2008: Obama as the First Black President
David Redlawsk, Caroline Tolbert & William Franko
Political Research Quarterly, December 2010, Pages 875-889
Abstract:
Social desirability effects make it difficult to learn voters' racial attitudes. List experiments can tap sensitive issues without directly asking respondents to express overt opinions. The authors report on such an experiment about Barack Obama as the first black president, finding that 30 percent of white Americans were "troubled" by the prospect of Obama as the first black president. The authors examine policy and emotional underpinnings of these responses, finding that expressed emotions of anxiety and enthusiasm condition latent racial attitudes and racial policy beliefs especially for those exhibiting a social desirability bias. The results suggest that Obama's victory despite this level of concern about race was at least in part a result of intense enthusiasm his campaign generated. This enthusiasm for Obama may have allowed some white voters to overcome latent concerns about his race. The research suggests emotions are critical in understanding racial attitudes.
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Keith Jenkins & Grant Cos
American Behavioral Scientist, November 2010, Pages 184-202
Abstract:
The lens of presidential rhetorical studies provides a solid foundation for understanding Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric. This study analyzes Barack Obama's strategies to create a pragmatic moral voice for the presidency. The authors argue that Obama's inclusive rhetorical campaign incorporated a rhetorical pragmatism. Rhetorical pragmatism is understood as discourse that negotiates uncertainty, generates knowledge based on human interest, expresses individualism (pluralism), and builds communities. The ends of this discourse are the means for achieving all of these. The authors found that the uncertainty of the nation's political, social, and rhetorical situations constituted the foundation on which all Obama's claims were staged. The ends of his campaign rhetoric were the traditional concern of constituting and reconstituting community. The authors believe, to fully appreciate Obama's campaign rhetoric, scholars need to observe how he reconstituted an American moral voice. In uncertain times, Americans could know that there were core ideals that they could hold up and live under. They could understand the individual stories and, with the help of an adept rhetor, connect their known experience to others to reassert the meaning of America.
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Kåre Vernby & Henning Finseraas
Politics & Society, December 2010, Pages 490-516
Abstract:
In this article, the authors set out to evaluate two competing mechanisms that may account for the negative relationship between xenophobia and left voting. Xenophobia may reduce left voting because parties of the right are more conservative on issues relating to immigration and ethnic relations (the policy-bundling effect), or it may reduce left voting because many potential left voters lack sympathy with the groups to whom redistribution is thought to be directed (the anti-solidarity effect). These two mechanisms imply radically different scenarios for political competition. Using a multilevel modeling approach, the authors analyze the data compiled in fifteen different surveys carried out in ten Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between 1990 and 2000. This study is the first to draw out the implications of these mechanisms for left voting and to subject them to empirical scrutiny in a large-scale comparative study. The results are consistent with the existence of a relatively strong policy-bundling effect; by contrast, the anti-solidarity effect is trivial in most of the surveys analyzed.
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The Median Voter Didn't Show Up: Costly Meetings and Insider Rents
Albert Saiz
Regional Science and Urban Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does changing from an assembly to a town-council form of government affect the way in which cities are run? Previous empirical research on this question has not found much of an impact of assemblies on aggregate outcomes such as local public expenditures or taxation. Nevertheless, the specific role of organized insiders may be important to understand how cities and towns governed by citizens' assemblies work. Existing surveys point to local workers as an important pressure group in local assemblies. Using data from local governments in New England I find that municipalities governed by assemblies pay around 4% to 10% higher salaries to their employees. This wage premium is bigger in assemblies with lower attendance, and increasing with the employees' voting power. I prove my results robust to the inclusion of an exogenous representative-government comparison group: municipalities in New York State that lie within 40 miles of the border with New England. The results demonstrate how insider groups derive some advantages from an assembly form of government. More broadly, the potential capture of assemblies by insider groups can be an important risk faced by municipalities with low citizen participation, which provides a rationale for the widespread adoption of representative government at the local level.
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Voting Behavior in Vote-by-Mail Elections
Priscilla Southwell
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The research examines both aggregate and individual level data in the state of Oregon-the only state that conducts all of its elections by mail. The aggregate analysis of 46 statewide elections (1980-2008) suggests that the vote-by-mail format is a major stimulus to voter participation in special and presidential elections in Oregon, while its effect on turnout in primary and off-year general elections is insignificant. Additional analysis of the official centralized voter registration lists in Oregon from 2000 to 2007 (approximately 2 million registered voters) confirms this tendency of Oregon voters to abstain in special elections, particularly for younger voters. These findings also suggest that voter turnout since the adoption of vote-by-mail in 1998 has been slightly lower for Republicans than for Democrats in primary elections and special elections.