Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

Blame,Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

There is a general consensus both in the news media and scholarly research that 2010 was a highly nationalized election year. Reports have indicated that anti-Obama sentiment, the Democrats’ legislative agenda, the economy, and the Tea Party were all factors contributing to Democratic losses in the congressional elections. In this paper, we use data from 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to examine the individual-level dynamics that contributed to the heightened nationalization of the 2010 congressional elections. Our analysis shows that Tea Party support and the attribution of blame and responsibility by voters are essential to understanding the 2010 election outcome, beyond what we would expect from a simple referendum model of midterm elections. Not surprisingly, Tea Party supporters blamed Democrats for the state of national affairs, disapproved of the Democrats’ policy agenda, and overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates in the congressional elections. However, our analysis shows that not all voters who supported Republican candidates were driven by high levels of opposition to President Obama and the Democrats. Another key group of voters blamed both Democrats and Republicans for the nation’s problems but ultimately held Democrats responsible in the voting booth by supporting Republican congressional candidates.     

Perceived electoral malfeasance and resentment over the election of Barack Obama

Controversies over voting outcomes, and subsequent laws to seemingly curb irregularities, have led to increased scrutiny over the process of voting day activities. While studies find evidence that majorities perceive rampant fraud, the explanations for these opinions have mainly pointed to political predispositions, largely ignoring the influence of racial attitudes. We propose that contemporary opinions on electoral malfeasance are shaped by the context of a popularly elected African American president, Barack Obama, and subsequent racial resentments. Analyses of data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study reveals that racial resentment significantly predicts higher perceiver electoral malfeasance, even after controlling for political predispositions. Surprisingly, significant racial resentment effects exist among both Obama and McCain supporters, and these effects are strongest among those who perceived Obama won because of his race. Our results highlight the hyper racialized spill-over effects into judgements about the political system.     

Direct democracy and regional integration: Citizens' perceptions of treaty implications and the Irish reversal on Lisbon

Analyses of voting in European Union referendums typically distinguish between ‘second‐order’ effects and the impact of substantive ‘issues’. In order to explain change in referendum outcome, two types of substantive issues are distinguished in this article. Focusing on Irish voting in the Lisbon Treaty referendums and using data from post‐referendum surveys, it is found that perceptions of treaty implications outperform underlying attitudes to EU integration in predicting vote choice at both referendums, and perceptions of treaty implications are strong predictors of vote change between the referendums. The findings have broadly positive implications for normative assessments of the usefulness of direct democracy as a tool for legitimising regional integration advance.     

Voting under uncertainty: the effect of information in the Scottish independence referendum

Despite extensive research on campaign effects, the issue of whether information can actually influence vote choice in a campaign remains debatable. This study provides novel evidence of how issue-based arguments influenced voting preferences in the campaign for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The findings, based on a lab experiment and a follow-up survey with the experimental subjects, show that provision of information lead to a one-sided persuasion effect, by increasing the support for independence mainly through reduction of indecision. This effect occurred regardless of the possibility to select the arguments and found further confirmation in the actual increase of Yes votes in the referendum. Additional analyses reveal that personal economic expectations significantly moderated the effect of information, since the support for independence increased only among those who did not expect future economic gains. In line with prospect theory, these results suggest that risk-based calculations and economic perceptions prove important determinants of voting decisions, especially in a context of asymmetrical vote choice between an uncertain “Yes for a change” and a safe “No for the status quo”.     

The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race

This study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross‐sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009–10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993–94.     

The impact of at-large elections: vote dilution or choice dilution?

Multi-member, at-large legislative elections result in election outcomes different from outcomes in single-member district elections for two reasons: they cancel out the voting strength of geographically concentrated groups of voters (e.g., party groups, racial groups), and they make it difficult for a voter to vote for an individual candidate, rather than for one of the competing lists of candidates. An electoral setting in Long Island, New York, presents an opportunity to test which of these two aspects of at-large elections—vote dilution or choice dilution—accounts for the usual pattern of one party (or group) winning all the legislative seats at stake.     

Risk Attitudes and Independence Vote Choice

In this article, we examine the impact of risk attitudes on vote choice in the context of a salient referendum with high levels of uncertainty about the consequences of the ballot proposal. Using data from a pre- and post-referendum panel survey conducted in the context of the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, and a specific battery to measure attitudes to risk, we determine how these attitudes operate in such political contexts. We reach two main conclusions. First, risk attitudes have a direct effect on vote choice, even after controlling for alternative explanations of vote choice such as party identification and leaders’ evaluations. In the aggregate, the effect of risk attitudes on the vote choice contributes to the status quo bias found in referendums. Second, we find that information moderates the effect of risk attitudes on vote choice. Voters who are politically knowledgeable have a greater capacity to predict the consequences of political outcomes and, therefore, they are less affected by their risk attitudes when making their ballot choices.

     

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

EU issue voting in European Parliament elections has been shown to be highly conditional upon levels of EU politicization. The present study analyzes this conditionality over time, hypothesizing that the effect of EU attitudes on EP vote preferences is catalyzed as EP elections draw closer. In contrast to extant cross-sectional post-election studies, we use a four-wave panel study covering the six months leading up to the Dutch EP elections of 2014, differentiating between party groups (pro, anti, mixed) and five EU attitude dimensions. We find that EU issue voting occurs for both anti- and pro-EU parties, but only increases for the latter. For mixed parties we find no effect of EU attitudes, yet their support base shifts in the anti-EU direction as the elections draw closer. The overarching image, however, is one of surprising stability: EU attitudes form a consistent part of EP voting motivations even outside EP election times.     

The architecture of the Electoral College,the House size effect,and the referendum paradox

Using data from U.S. presidential elections, we show how seemingly insignificant changes to what we call the “architecture” of the Electoral College can cause different candidates to be elected President, even when no one changes how they vote. We consider varying the size of the House of Representatives, the method of apportionment, the number of “Senate” electoral votes cast by each state, and the lower bound on the number of “House” electoral votes cast by each state. We consider, in particular, elections with a “referendum paradox”. In these elections, the electoral vote winner is not the popular vote winner. Our work extends Neubauer and Zeitlin (2003) who analyzed the case of the 2000 election. We give an explanation for the effects that we observe in the data.     

Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era

While scholars have found that Trump was able to capitalize on the racial attitudes of white voters, it is less clear how these racial attitudes influenced vote-choice across partisan and ideological cleavages in the electorate. It is also unclear whether racial attitudes affected voting at the congressional level or electoral outcomes at the aggregate level. Using a novel measure of racial attitudes at the subnational level and survey data, we make three clear findings: (1) Trump and Republican congressional candidates benefited from conservative racial attitudes both at the aggregate level and among white voters, (2) this electoral benefit for Republicans persisted during the 2018 midterm elections, and (3) the effect of attitudes on vote-choice did not significantly vary across partisan and ideological cleavages in the white electorate. Our findings suggest that, even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate. These findings have implications for the growing salience of race in the Republican electoral coalition.     

Does the Ideological Proximity Between Candidates and Voters Affect Voting in U.S. House Elections?

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.     

Is referendum voting distinctive? Evidence from three UK cases

The study of referendum voting follows much the same format as for general election voting. Influences on vote, however, are likely to differ significantly. Referendums decide issues, while general elections determine which party or parties will form the government. Parties are often divided on referendum issues and these issues tend to be of low salience. General elections, however, are contested by long-established parties on highly salient issues. Using panel data from the British Election Study and the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum Study, we find that voters place different weights on party identification, issue positions, government and leader evaluations when voting in general elections and referendums, but the evidence for differential campaign effects is limited.     

Reciprocal causation in a model of the vote: Replication and extension

Page and Jones, and others, have argued that recursive models of the vote fail to take account of the inherent complexity of the decision processes involved and that estimates from these models are prone to errors, which result in understatement of the amount of policy voting. They propose a causal structure, in which reciprocal influences are modeled explicitly, and estimate its parameters with partially independent samples from two presidential elections. Their model, however, is restricted to presidential contests and omits economic issues. Similarly, the literature on economic voting has ignored the presence of potential reciprocal influences on economic policy attitudes. This paper develops a novel measure of economic issue preferences, modifies the earlier model to include both economic and social issues, and tests the model on data from an independent sample of voters in the 1978 congressional elections. Estimates from the elaborated model generally comport well with the results obtained by Page and Jones, and the findings show a higher degree of economic issue voting than most previous studies.     

Violence,voting & peace: Explaining public support for the peace referendum in Colombia

How does political violence affect popular support for peace? We answer this question by examining Colombia, where in 2016 the people narrowly and unexpectedly voted against a peace agreement designed to end a half century of civil war. Building on research on the impact of political violence on elections as well as research on referendum/initiative voting in the United States, we argue that local experiences with violence and the political context will lead to heightened support for peace. We test these expectations using spatial modeling and a municipal-level data on voting in the 2016 Colombian peace referendum, and find that municipal-level support for the referendum increases with greater exposure to violence and increasing support for President Santos. These results are spatially distributed, so that exposure to violence in one municipality is associated with greater support for the peace referendum in that municipality and also in surrounding areas. Our findings have implications not only for Colombia, but for all post-war votes and other contexts in which referenda and elections have major and/or unexpected results.     

Economic voting in Portugal, 2002–2009

This article tests the economic voting hypothesis in Portugal during the three most recent first-order elections (2002, 2005, 2009), trying to make sense of the multiplicity of choices in the Portuguese party system. We observed that positive sociotropic perceptions increase the probability to vote for the incumbent, even when we control for long-term factors of vote choice; egotropic effects are weaker. Negative economic perceptions not only lead to a higher probability to vote for the major opposition party, but, in some cases, increase the probabilities to vote for small parties or to refrain from voting. Sociotropic effects are actually quite constant in this timeframe, but their strength to explain the vote is lower than that of ideology and (before 2009) religiosity.     

The distorting effects of racial animus on proximity voting in the 2016 elections

While the use of racial appeals by the 2016 Trump campaign is indisputable, researchers are actively debating their precise role in influencing voter behavior in the election. We seek to expand upon existing research which finds that racial animus electorally benefited the Trump campaign. We examine to what extent those benefits also materialized for GOP candidates down-ballot and whether racial animus distorted ideological proximity voting in the 2016 election. We find that racial animus among voters helped Republicans at multiple ballot levels and that higher levels of racial animus distorted spatial voting among voters ideologically closest to the Democratic candidate.     

Assessing strategic voting in the 2008 US presidential primaries: the role of electoral context,institutional rules,and negative votes

We examine the nature and extent of strategic voting in the 2008 US presidential primary. In doing so, we distinguish positive strategic voters—those casting ballots for their second choice in the primary and general election—from negative strategic voters—those casting ballots for a candidate they want to lose in the general election. We find evidence of both types in 2008. Moreover, we show that the likelihood of voting strategically is related to the electoral and institutional context. Specifically, those who prefer trailing candidates and who live in states with open primaries or with elections after John McCain became the presumed nominee were more likely to vote strategically.     

The Impact of EU Referenda on National Electoral Politics: The Dutch Case

This study deals with the issue of increasing contention regarding European matters in national arenas. Specifically, it focuses on the impact of European Union referenda on national elections. EU referenda have two important consequences for national politics: they increase inter-party conflict over Europe and gear up voters' salience to EU matters. In doing so, EU referenda allow voters to identify parties closest to them on the EU issue, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will vote for a party on the basis of EU attitudes (i.e. EU issue voting). These propositions are evaluated empirically in a quasi-experimental setting by comparing two parliamentary elections before and after the first Dutch EU referendum in 2005. The findings show that referenda indeed facilitate the development of EU issue voting. Consequently, the conclusions of this study are not only relevant to observers of Dutch politics, but also contribute to a larger debate within the field of EU studies.     

Reconsidering pocketbook voting: An experimental approach

Despite its deep theoretical roots, the idea that voters reward or punish incumbents in national elections for trends in their personal financial circumstances has not fared well when subjected to empirical test. This paper poses an experimental test of the leading explanations for the surprisingly weak showing of pocketbook influences on vote choice. According to certain of these explanations, the answer lies in distinguishing between sociotropic and self-interested economic voting, or between retrospective and prospective economic voting, or between perceptions of economic trends in general and perceptions of the electorally relevant component of these trends. However, expectations based on these explanations are generally not borne out in the laboratory setting. Consistent with the observed pattern of effects, however, is the idea that pocketbook voting displays little independent impact because economic perceptions and attributions are epiphenomena—strongly biased by the voter's preexisting political commitments.