Votes of Confidence
Trust in the Count: Improving Voter Confidence with Post-election Audits
Jacob Jaffe et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, July 2024, Pages 585–607
Abstract:
Post-election audits are thought to bolster voter confidence in elections, but it is unclear which aspects of audits drive public trust. Using preregistered vignette and conjoint survey experiments administered by YouGov on a sample of 2,000 American respondents, we find that how an audit is conducted is more important than what an audit finds. Structural features of audits, like who conducts it and how its results are announced, turn out to be more consequential to voter evaluations of election results than the actual discrepancy found. Moreover, while Democrats and Republicans have increasingly divided views of the state of democracy in the United States, they are similarly receptive to information presented about audits and largely agree that audits are effective tools for detecting errors in vote counting. Our findings thus reinforce the expectation that audits do increase voter trust and highlight that election administrators can strengthen voter confidence by making audits as transparent as possible.
Unobserved Contributions and Political Influence: Evidence from the Death of Top Donors
Marco Battaglini et al.
NBER Working Paper, July 2024
Abstract:
It has long been observed that there is little money in U.S. politics compared to the stakes. But what if contributions are not fully observable or non-monetary in nature and thus not easily quantifiable? We study this question with a new data set on the top 1000 donors in U.S. congressional races. Since top donors do not randomly support candidates, we propose an identification strategy based on information about top donors' deaths and the observed variations in candidates' performance after these events. The death of a top donor significantly decreases a candidate's chances of being elected in the current and future election cycles. Moreover, it affects the legislative activities of elected candidates. These effects do not depend on top donors' monetary contributions to a candidate but on their prominence and their total contributions during the election campaign.
Give Parents the Vote
Joshua Kleinfeld & Stephen Sachs
Notre Dame Law Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many of America’s most significant policy problems, from failing schools to the aftershocks of COVID shutdowns to national debt to climate change, share a common factor: the weak political power of children. Children are 23% of all citizens; they have distinct interests; and they already count for electoral districting. But because they lack the maturity to vote for themselves, their interests don’t count proportionally at the polls. The result is policy that observably disserves children’s interests and violates a deep principle of democratic fairness: that citizens, through voting, can make political power respond to their interests. Yet there’s a fix. We should entrust children’s interests in the voting booth to the same people we entrust with those interests everywhere else: their parents. Voting parents should be able to cast proxy ballots on behalf of their minor children. So should the court-appointed guardians of those who can’t vote due to mental incapacity. This proposal would be pragmatically feasible, constitutionally permissible, and breathtakingly significant: perhaps no single intervention would, at a stroke, more profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians. And, crucially, it would be entirely a matter of state law. Giving parents the vote is a reform that any state can adopt, both for its own elections and for its representation in Congress and the Electoral College.
From Confidence to Convenience: Changes in Voting Systems, Donald Trump, and Voter Confidence
Luke Carter et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, July 2024, Pages 516–535
Abstract:
A growing body of research indicates that voters’ perceptions of the electoral system change when the means of administering elections change. As some electoral jurisdictions have moved to systems designed to increase voter convenience, little is known about whether convenience is achieved at the expense of confidence. Utah’s rollout of Vote by Mail (VBM) occurred county by county across five federal elections, and the three most populous counties adopted all VBM elections successively in 2014, 2016, and 2018. This meaningful variance in voter experience with VBM allows us to model the relationship between experience with VBM and voter confidence. We find that the switch to a more convenient system of voting came at the expense of diminished confidence in the voting process. However, experience with VBM is positively related to confidence such that the loss in confidence can be recouped over time. To capture this dynamic relative to other factors, we also estimate the effects of partisanship and the messages of political elites. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the effect of partisanship on voter confidence changed compared to just two years earlier. Elite messages appear to be especially negative for Trump voters after 2020. More experience with VBM acts as a bulwark against those negative messages, almost completely attenuating the negative effects of Trump’s fraud claims among his voters with the highest levels of VBM experience.
Policy Impact and Voter Mobilization: Evidence from Farmers’ Trade War Experiences
Jake Alton Jares & Neil Malhotra
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
How does the extent of policy benefits -- not simply their presence -- affect political engagement? While fundamental to understanding the electoral implications of economic policymaking, addressing this question is challenging due to the difficulty of measuring individual voters’ policy outcomes. We examine a natural experiment embedded in President Trump’s Market Facilitation Program (MFP), which aided a core Republican constituency: farmers harmed by his 2018 trade war. Due to idiosyncrasies of program design, the MFP undercompensated some farmers for their trade war losses -- and significantly overcompensated others -- based solely on their 2018 crop portfolios. Analyzing over 165,000 affected voters, we show that improved compensation outcomes had negligible impacts on Republican farmers’ midterm turnout and campaign contributions, even though such variation in benefits significantly affected farmers’ propensity to view the intervention as helpful. This null result is important -- our estimates suggest that even highly salient variation in policy outcomes may have limited mobilizing capacity.
Who Decides? Media, MAGA, Money, and Mentions in the 2022 Republican Primaries
Rachel Blum, Mike Cowburn & Seth Masket
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political elites play an important role in determining who wins primaries, yet comparatively little is known about which voices in party networks matter when different intra-party signals are sent. We examine this question using an original dataset of Republican Senate and gubernatorial primaries in 2022, an election cycle with substantial intra-party conflict in primary elections. We demonstrate that Fox News appearances (media), Trump’s endorsements (MAGA), campaign fundraising (money), and Twitter engagement (mentions) were all positively associated with vote share. We then assess the state of primary fields prior to Trump’s endorsements, showing that endorsed candidates were outperforming their competitors prior to his involvement. Finally, we consider the state of primary fields after Trump endorsed, demonstrating that his support was associated with a thirteen percentage point increase in both fundraising share and polling which lasted through to the primary. These findings provide clarity on the relative weight of different signals in contested party nominations.
How Do Consumers React to Ads That Meddle in Out-Party Primaries?
Mohamed Hussein, Courtney Lee & Christian Wheeler
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 2022, Democrats spent $53 million on ads helping far-right candidates win Republican primaries. Paying for ads that support far-right candidates, the reasoning went, could help Democrats win in the general elections because it is easier to beat extreme than moderate candidates. In the current research, we ask: how do consumers react to the use of “meddle ads”? On the one hand, because of rising levels of polarization, consumers might be accepting, or even supportive, of meddle ads. On the other hand, because meddle ads might come across as unethical and risky, consumers might be averse to their use. Across seven main studies and ten supplemental studies (N = 7,740) using multiple empirical approaches -- including conjoint analysis, vignette studies, incentive-compatible donation studies, and analysis of online comments using human coders and NLP tools -- we find that consumers are averse to the use of meddle ads. This aversion is driven by three factors: concerns about the character of the candidate, outcome-related risk (losing elections), and system-related risk (losing trust in democracy). These findings contribute to research on political marketing, provide practical guidance for marketers around meddle ads, and identify a novel type of risk perceptions with implications for consumer behavior research.
The American Viewer: Political Consequences of Entertainment Media
Eunji Kim & Shawn Patterson
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data -- content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers -- we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of nonconventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.
Spotlighting the Economy: Media Coverage and Mayoral Evaluations
Richard Burke
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article examines local media's moderating role in the relationship between local economic performance and mayoral approval. Media's moderating role is especially important in subnational contexts, such as cities, where citizens have particularly low levels of political knowledge. In this article, I hypothesize that the economy's influence on mayoral approval is conditional on the economic coverage of the mayor. I tested this hypothesis on two different datasets. First, I matched twenty-five years of mayoral approval and economic data from New York City with New York Times coverage during the same period. Next, I paired mayoral approval data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study with mayoral news coverage from 40 large cities. In both tests, I found evidence that the relationship between local economic performance and public attitudes toward mayors was conditional on whether local media focused on the economy in its mayoral coverage.
Is Some Politics Still Local? Voter Preferences for Local Candidates
Charles Hunt & David Fontana
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous literature has demonstrated electoral advantages for candidates with backgrounds in the communities they represent, even amidst the trends of partisan polarization and the nationalization of elections. Here, we consider voter preferences for local candidates using a broader range of methods, jurisdictions, time periods, and populations than has previously been utilized. Our results leverage a survey experiment presenting respondents with pairs of fictional open-seat U.S. Senate candidates with varying degrees of local backgrounds. Voters consistently responded more favorably to locally-rooted candidates across different states. We also present novel evidence that local candidate effects are due largely to voters crossing party lines, and that the parties are asymmetrical in their responses to localism and carpetbagging, with Democrats benefitting from local ties more than Republicans. Observational data on real-life Senate candidates from 1960 to 2020 largely mirror our main experimental findings. Together, these findings demonstrate that local connections matter in more nuanced ways than have been previously considered.