Mobilizing Interest: The Effects of Money on Citizen Participation in State Supreme Court Elections

In this article, we investigate one highly significant aspect of the role of money in judicial elections: whether campaign spending increases citizen participation in the recruitment and retention of judges. Specifically, by using a two-stage modeling strategy that allows us to separate the effects of challengers from the effects of money, we assess whether relatively expensive campaigns improve the chances that citizens will vote in the 260 supreme court elections held from 1990 through 2004 in 18 states using partisan or nonpartisan elections to staff the high court bench. We find that increased spending significantly improves citizen participation in these races. Whether measured as the overall spending in each election or in per capita terms, greater spending facilitates voting. We conclude, contrary to conventional wisdom about the deleterious effects of money in judicial elections, that by stimulating mass participation and giving voters greater ownership in the outcomes of these races, expensive campaigns strengthen the critical linkage between citizens and the bench and enhance the quality of democracy.     

An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame

Prior experimental research has demonstrated that voter turnout rises substantially when people receive mailings that indicate whether they voted in previous elections. This effect suggests that voters are sensitive to whether their compliance with the norm of voting is being monitored. The present study extends this line of research by investigating whether disclosure of past participation has a stronger effect on turnout when it calls attention to a past abstention or a past vote. A sample of 369,211 registered voters who voted in just one of two recent elections were randomly assigned to receive no mail, mail that encouraged them to vote, and mail that both encouraged them to vote and indicated their turnout in one previous election. The latter type of mailing randomly reported either the election in which they voted or the one in which they abstained. Results suggest that mailings disclosing past voting behavior had strong effects on voter turnout and that these effects were significantly enhanced when it disclosed an abstention in a recent election.     

Electoral Cycles and Turnout in Multilevel Electoral Systems

This article differentiates between three ways in which electoral cycles may impact on participation in elections. First, it identifies a simultaneity effect – turnout increases to the extent that elections are held on the same date. A second effect is voter fatigue – turnout declines when another election has just been held before. Poll voting is a third effect. It suggests that turnout increases when another election is to be held shortly after. On the basis of a novel dataset that includes 2,915 regional elections held in 317 regions and 18 countries from 1945 to 2009, evidence is found for all three effects. The results point towards a basic dilemma in multilevel electoral systems: increase turnout by holding elections on the same date but accept high vote congruence across elections or decouple election cycles, which decreases vote congruence but lowers participation rates.     

Approval and plurality voting with uncertainty: Info-gap analysis of robustness

Voting algorithms are used to choose candidates by an electorate. However, voter participation is variable and uncertain, and projections from polls or past elections are uncertain because voter preferences may change. Furthermore, electoral victory margins are often slim. Variable voter participation or preferences, and slim margins of decision, have implications for choosing a voting algorithm. We focus on approval voting (AV) and compare it to plurality voting (PV), regarding their robustness to uncertainty in voting outcomes. We ask: by how much can voting outcomes change without altering the election outcomes? We see fairly consistent empirical differences between AV and PV. In single-winner elections, PV tends to be more robust to vote uncertainty than AV in races with large victory margins, while AV tends to be more robust at low victory margins. Two conflicting concepts—approval flattening and approval magnification—explain this tendency for reversal of robust dominance between PV and AV. We also examine the robustness to vote uncertainty of PV in elections for proportional representation of parties.

     

The nonpartisan ballot and the decline of American parties: A contextual effect?

The nonpartisan municipal ballot is one of several turn-of-the-century reforms intended to weaken political parties. Through its effects on individuals' political contexts and voting experiences, it might have contributed to the twentieth-century decline in public support for political parties. This paper tests this hypothesis with items available in the 1980 CPS presidential election survey augmented with a ballot form variable. There are no significant differences in measures of party support among residents of partisan and nonpartisan communities, and thus no measurable evidence that nonpartisan elections discouraged the public from supporting political parties.This is a revised version of a paper delivered at the XIII World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, July 1985.     

Misleading ballot position cue: Party voting in Korea's nonpartisan local elections

In this study, I present evidence that ballot order can provide a misleading cue to voters. In South Korea, nonpartisan municipal legislative elections were held concurrently with other partisan local elections until 2002. The ballot order of the candidates running in nonpartisan elections was randomly determined, whereas it was determined according to a party's number of seats in the national legislature for candidates running in partisan elections. Therefore, if voters are fully informed, the vote share for the candidate listed first in the nonpartisan ballot should not be correlated with the vote share for the party listed first on the partisan ballot. However, I find that the vote share for a first-listed candidate increases when the first-listed party's vote share increases. I also find that the presence of an incumbent does not significantly reduce the degree to which voters mistakenly use ballot position as a party cue.     

Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina

In this paper I study strategic voting behavior in the Argentine Senate election for the City of Buenos Aires in 2013. I estimate and analyze the voter transition matrix between the primary and general elections using a Bayesian hierarchical model for ecological inference, utilizing a rich data set of ballot box data. The results show that strategic behavior is not widespread among the electorate in Buenos Aires. In particular, at least 75 % of voters who had the opportunity to avoid vote wasting by behaving strategically did not. I also find high levels of vote wasting when analyzing other provinces during the same election cycle. These results suggest that these electorates might be composed of a mixture of voters with strategic and expressive motivations, where the expressive factions dominate.     

Does Voting History Matter? Analysing Persistence in Turnout

Individuals who vote in one election are more likely to vote in the next. Yet modelling the causal relationship between past and current voting decisions is intrinsically difficult, as this positive association can exist due to habit formation or unobserved heterogeneity. This article overcomes this problem using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study (NCDS) to examine voter turnout across three elections. It distinguishes between unobserved heterogeneity caused by fixed individual characteristics and the initial conditions problem, which occurs when voting behavior in a previous, but unobserved, period influences current voting behavior. It finds that, controlling for fixed effects, unobserved heterogeneity has little impact on the estimated degree of habit in voter turnout; however, failing to control for initial conditions reduces the estimate by a half. The results imply that voting in one election increases the probability of voting in a subsequent election by 13%.     

Is Voting Habit Forming? New Evidence from Experiments and Regression Discontinuities

Field experiments and regression discontinuity designs test whether voting is habit forming by examining whether a random shock to turnout in one election affects participation in subsequent elections. We contribute to this literature by offering a vast amount of new statistical evidence on the long‐term consequences of random and quasi‐random inducements to vote. The behavior of millions of voters confirms the persistence of voter turnout and calls attention to theoretically meaningful nuances in the development and expression of voting habits. We suggest that individuals become habituated to voting in particular types of elections. The degree of persistence appears to vary by electoral context and by the attributes of those who comply with an initial inducement to vote.     

Are Voters Mobilized by a ‘Friend-and-Neighbor’ on the Ballot? Evidence from a Field Experiment

In his seminal work on Southern politics, V.O. Key observed that voters disproportionately support local candidates at the ballot box. While empirical analyses have confirmed “friends-and-neighbors” voting across numerous electoral contexts, no one has directly examined voter turnout as the mechanism linking place of residence to vote choice. We argue that place of residence is a social identity that incentivizes citizens to turn out to vote on behalf of the local candidate. We test this mobilization mechanism using a randomized field experiment conducted during a 2014 state legislative primary election. Our results show that county ties between candidates and voters likely boost turnout. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the importance of place identity for turnout decisions in low-information elections.     

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.     

Ecological inference under unfavorable conditions: Straight and split-ticket voting in diverse settings and small samples

Problems of ecological inference have long troubled political scientists. Thomsen's (1987) estimator for ecological inference has been shown to produce estimates close to the individual level estimates for transitions across elections, but it is unknown how well it performs under unfavorable conditions. We fill this void by testing the estimator as the across-unit variance increases and introduce a new procedure to examine the bias of the estimates as the number of aggregate units decreases. Looking at partisan voting patterns across races within the 2000 general election in Florida counties and taking advantage of ballot image data to study straight-ticket voting we demonstrate that the estimator performs well in both heterogeneous societies and when the number of aggregate units is limited.     

The Downsian voter meets the ecological fallacy

This paper presents evidence that voter participation does not depend on the probability that one vote is decisive. An extensive summary of the empirical participation literature is provided which shows that most but not all studies have found that turnout in an electoral district is higher when the race is closer. Individual-level vote regressions for the 1979 and 1980 Canadian national elections are estimated using objective measures of closeness (as opposed to self-reported measures). The main finding is that a citizen is no more likely to vote in a close election than in a lands-lide election. District-level turnout regressions for the same elections are also estimated, and a significant relation between closeness and turnout is observed. This suggests that aggregation bias may generate a spurious closeness-turnout relation in district-level regressions.     

Who Votes for the Future? Information,Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting

Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.     

Voting May Be Habit-Forming: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Habit is a frequently mentioned but understudied cause of political action. This article provides the first direct test of the hypothesis that casting a ballot in one election increases one's propensity to go to the polls in the future. A field experiment involving 25,200 registered voters was conducted prior to the November general election of 1998. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which they were urged to vote through direct mail or face-to-face canvassing. Compared to a control group that received no contact, the treatment groups were significantly more likely to vote in 1998. The treatment groups were also significantly more likely to vote in local elections held in November of 1999. After deriving a statistical estimator to isolate the effect of habit, we find that, ceteris paribus, voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future. Indeed, the influence of past voting exceeds the effects of age and education reported in previous studies.     

Timing the habit: Voter registration and turnout

Does registration timing impact whether an individual becomes a habitual voter? We argue that those registering in near proximity to a presidential election are more likely to vote in the upcoming election compared to those who register at other times during an election cycle because they seek an immediate return on their investment, but they are less likely to become habituated to vote in subsequent mid-term and primary elections. We suggest that this is because last-minute registrants, many of whom were registered through voter registration drives, were not focused on long-term electoral payoffs. Leveraging Florida's statewide voter files, we use logistic regression and propensity score weighting with county fixed-effects to evaluate if the timing of voter registration has significant short- and long-term turnout effects in high- and low-salience elections, controlling for party registration and an array of demographic factors. We find that the timing of registration does affect turnout, as last-minute registrants are not equally likely to vote in ensuing elections.     

Non-voted ballots, the cost of voting, and race

The enormous controversy over Florida’s 2000 presidential election focused everyone’s attention on ballots with no recorded vote in presidential races, but non-voting generally becomes greater farther down the ballot and the drop-off rate varies by type of machine. Ward-level data for the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections in Ohio demonstrate that only looking at races at the top of the ballot is misleading. The rush to eliminate punch card ballots actually increases the number of non-votes for other offices than it reduces them for the presidential election at the top. Differential impacts of voting machines by race, gender, and age are also examined.     

Approval voting,Condorcet's principle,and runoff elections

Approval voting allows each voter to vote for as many candidates as he wishes in an election but not cast more than one vote for each candidate of whom he approves. If there is a strict Condorcet candidate — a candidate who defeats all others in pairwise contests — approval voting is shown to be the only nonranked voting system that is always able to elect the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use sincere admissible strategies. Moreover, if a strict Condorcet candidate must be elected under ordinary plurality voting when voters use admissible strategies, then he must also be elected under approval voting when voters use admissible strategies, but the converse does not hold. The widely used plurality runoff method can also elect a strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies on the first ballot, but some of these may have to be insincere to get the strict Condorcet candidate onto the runoff ballot. Furthermore, there is no case in which the strict Condorcet candidate is invariably elected under the plurality runoff method when voters use admissible first-ballot strategies. Thus, approval voting is superior to the plurality runoff method with respect to the Condorcet principle in its ability to elect the strict Condorcet candidate by sincere voting and in its ability to guarantee the election of the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies. In addition, approval voting is more efficient since it requires only one election and is probably less subject to strategic manipulation.     

The turnout ‘gap’ and the costs of voting – a comparison of participation at the 2001 general and 2002 local elections in England

Evidence from both sample surveys and the marked electoral registers is used to compare the participation of individual electors at the 2001 general election and the 2002 local elections in England. In those cases where conventional electoral procedures have been retained, there is a continuing gap between local and general election turnout. Those who vote at both types of election tend to have a sharper sense of civic duty and/or an incentive to vote based on the benefits perceived to be likely to accrue from the outcome of the local contest. However, in those places where the costs of participation are reduced through the introduction of all-postal voting, the turnout gap disappears as does the distinctive character of those who vote in local elections. In each case the findings support a rational choice model of participation with respondents weighing the benefits and costs of voting in the context of their own sense of duty.