Election observer effects: A field experiment in the Russian Duma election of 2011

The literature on elections and election monitoring is divided between those who take a skeptical view, suggesting that monitors are often political rather than objective in their judgments, and those who see monitors as a real force for cleaner, more honest elections. Studies that use field experiments to look for the effect of monitors generally support the optimists, indicating that the mere presence of election observers can have powerful effects. This is surprising given the extent of the resources available to incumbents who wish to conduct electoral fraud. We present the results of an experiment in which 768 observers were randomly assigned to polling stations in 21 cities in Russia in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Unlike most previous studies of election observers, our results suggest that observer effects on turnout and vote for the ruling party are small. The results suggest the need to study more carefully the circumstances that shape the impact of observation missions.     

Judging the “Vapid and Hollow Charade”: Citizen Evaluations and the Candor of U.S. Supreme Court Nominees

Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been famously called a “vapid and hollow charade” by Elena Kagan. Indeed, perceptions of nominees’ refusal to answer questions about pending cases, prominent political issues, or give any hint of their ideological leanings have become a cornerstone of the modern confirmation process. We investigate the extent to which this reticence to speak of their ideological views, or candor, influences how individuals evaluate the nominee. To this end, we present the results of a survey experiment which examines how support for a hypothetical Supreme Court nominee is affected by information, especially when a nominee is presented to be very forthright or very reticent in answering ideological questions during the confirmation hearings. We find that while partisan compatibility with the president is the main determinant of support for a nominee, nominees who refuse to answer ideological questions can bolster support from respondents who would not support them on partisan grounds. We supplement these findings with observational state-level support data from real nominees over the last 40 years.     

Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion

Political parties play a vital role in democracies by linking citizens to their representatives. Nonetheless, a longstanding concern is that partisan identification slants decision-making. Citizens may support (oppose) policies that they would otherwise oppose (support) in the absence of an endorsement from a political party—this is due in large part to what is called partisan motivated reasoning where individuals interpret information through the lens of their party commitment. We explore partisan motivated reasoning in a survey experiment focusing on support for an energy law. We identify two politically relevant factors that condition partisan motivated reasoning: (1) an explicit inducement to form an “accurate” opinion, and (2) cross-partisan, but not consensus, bipartisan support for the law. We further provide evidence of how partisan motivated reasoning works psychologically and affects opinion strength. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for understanding opinion formation and the overall quality of citizens’ opinions.     

Permitting States to Rescind Ratifications of Pending Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

Among the troublesome questions still surrounding the U.S. constitutionalamending process is whether states should be allowed to rescindratifications of pending amendments. The Constitution is silentabout this issue. Arguments from fairness and contemporary consensus,and concerns about hasty changes, support the acceptance ofrescissions. Arguments for finality, the desirability of encouragingstate legislatures to make serious decisions, and the difficultyof the current process suggest that rescissions should not bepermitted, but these concerns are not as weighty as they mightappear at first. A law accepting or rejecting all rescissionsis preferable to a system where Congress makes partisan judgmentsin individual cases.     

Source Cues, Partisan Identities, and Political Value Expression

This article examines the conditions under which partisan identities shape the positions people express on four political values: equal opportunity, self-reliance, moral traditionalism, and moral tolerance. The theoretical framework posits that (1) party source cues activate latent partisan biases in the minds of citizens, which in turn affect the degree to which individuals express support for these values; (2) out-party cues are more powerful motivators of value expression than in-party cues; (3) value shifts are more pronounced when liberal-conservative identities reinforce partisan sentiments; and (4) partisan cues promote horizontal constraint among these values. These hypotheses are tested using data from a set of experiments appearing on a novel national survey. The empirical results generally support these theoretical expectations.     

Hidden in plain sight? Irregularities on statutory forms and electoral fraud

The most common method of tabulating election results around the world is manually compiling paper forms at the local level. Recent election disputes in developing democracies, particularly in Africa, have centered on irregularities observed on these forms. However, scholars do not yet have a good understanding of the distribution of these irregularities, nor of their relationship to systematic fraud. In this paper, we theorize a catalog of irregularities that goes beyond simple vote tally editing. We use deep neural networks to identify these irregularities on forms from about 30,000 polling stations in Kenya’s 2013 presidential election. We find that although irregularities manifest differently in government and opposition strongholds, they do not correlate with election outcomes, and they are unaffected by the presence of electoral observers. Taken together, our findings suggest scholars of election integrity should pay greater attention to problems of benign human error and overtaxed bureaucrats.     

Does fraud trump partisanship? The impact of contentious elections on voter confidence

Fraudulent elections can reduce citizen trust in elections and other political institutions. But what about the impact of contentious elections that resolve successfully, leading to democratizing change? Do national movements toward democracy trump individual experiences with electoral manipulation? Using public opinion survey data collected before and after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we evaluate changes in voter confidence in electoral practices, political institutions, and democracy. Although national trends show increased voter confidence overall, subnational variation suggests pervasive partisan differences in opinions about election quality and institutional confidence. Remarkably, we find that direct exposure to fraud matters far less than anticipated; voters who were personally exposed to fraud felt no more or less confident than their co-partisans. We show that partisanship and the national electoral context may interact in ways that complicate the effects of democratizing elections, suggesting important avenues for future research.     

On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes”

Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity undermine the comparison. Three survey experiments show that providing partisan and nonpartisan information readily available to legislators materially changes respondents' expressed preferences on roll‐call votes. With information, expressed policy positions are both less centrist and more closely matched to legislator behavior in their preferred party. Respondents also appear aware of their own lack of knowledge in evaluating roll‐call policy votes. The treatment effect of information decreases in confidence judging policy in that area. We show similar patterns for respondent opinions on Supreme Court decisions.     

Candidate Choice Without Party Labels:

In the absence of party labels, voters must use other information to determine whom to support. The institution of nonpartisan elections, therefore, may impact voter choice by increasing the weight that voters place on candidate dimensions other than partisanship. We hypothesize that in nonpartisan elections, voters will exhibit a stronger preference for candidates with greater career and political experience, as well as candidates who can successfully signal partisan or ideological affiliation without directly using labels. To test these hypotheses, we conducted conjoint survey experiments on both nationally representative and convenience samples that vary the presence or absence of partisan information. The primary result of these experiments indicates that when voters cannot rely on party labels, they give greater weight to candidate experience. We find that this process unfolds differently for respondents of different partisan affiliations: Republicans respond to the removal of partisan information by giving greater weight to job experience while Democrats respond by giving greater weight to political experience. Our results lend microfoundational support to the notion that partisan information can crowd out other kinds of candidate information.     

Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information‐Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading?

Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.     

The Policy Basis of Measured Partisan Animosity in the United States

Understanding and addressing the consequences of partisan animosity requires knowledge of its foundations. To what extent is animosity between partisan groups motivated by dislike for partisan outgroups per se, policy disagreement, or other social group conflicts? In many circumstances, including extant experimental research, these patterns are observationally equivalent. In a series of vignette evaluation experiments, we estimate effects of shared partisanship when additional information is or is not present, and we benchmark these effects against shared policy preference effects. Partisanship effects are about 71% as large as shared policy preference effects when each is presented in isolation. When an independently randomized party and policy position are presented together, partisanship effects decrease substantially, by about 52%, whereas policy effects remain large, decreasing by about 10%. These results suggest that common measures of partisan animosity may capture programmatic conflict more so than social identity–based partisan hostility.     

European ruling parties’ electoral strategies and overseas enfranchisement policies

Emigrants’ ideologies and partisan attitudes may diverge from other voters’: overseas voters are ideologically self-selected, receive distinctive information about campaigns and have experiences abroad that are likely to shape their political views. Parties, anticipating these emigrant attitudes, can manipulate overseas voting availability to give the vote primarily to their own supporters. Alternatively, parties may expect newly enfranchised voters to provide electoral support in gratitude for the right to vote. To distinguish these separate processes, this project undertakes a case study of Turkey to trace a ruling party's strategic expectations as it makes overseas-enfranchisement decisions. To see how generalisable these results are, the study further extends to a statistical analysis of differences in vote choice between voters at home and abroad across all 23 European countries that report overseas votes separately, using an original dataset encompassing 121 elections. Both the case study and the statistical analysis suggest that emigrant-enfranchising parties tend to garner overseas voters’ support in a lasting way. This suggests that overseas enfranchisement most often appears to involve incumbent parties (correctly) expecting long-term ideological compatibility with their overseas nationals, not simply exchanging the franchise for short-term, transactional support.     

Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Does partisan conflict damage citizens’ perceptions of Congress? If so, why has polarization increased in Congress since the 1970s? To address these questions, we unpack the “electoral connection” by exploring the mass public's attitudes toward partisan conflict via two survey experiments in which we manipulated characteristics of members and Congress. We find that party conflict reduces confidence in Congress among citizens across the partisan spectrum. However, there exists heterogeneity by strength of party identification with respect to evaluations of members. Independents and weak partisans are more supportive of members who espouse a bipartisan image, whereas strong partisans are less supportive. People with strong attachments to a political party disavow conflict in the aggregate but approve of individual members behaving in a partisan manner. This pattern helps us understand why members in safely partisan districts engage in partisan conflict even though partisanship damages the collective reputation of the institution.     

Violence,Nonviolence, and the Effects of International Human Rights Law

Under what conditions are individuals more likely to approve of human rights abuses by their governments? While various theoretical expectations have been offered about public approval of repression, many of them have not been directly tested. We analyze the effects of differing opposition tactics, differing government tactics, and legal constraints on approval of repression through a series of survey experiments in India, Israel, and Argentina. Our results indicate that violent action by opposition groups consistently increases support for government repression. In the context of contentious politics, we find that the effects of international law vary by national context. While our respondents in India were less likely to approve of their government when told the government violated international law, the same information likely increased approval of the government in our Israel experiment. The findings provide insights into the microfoundations of existing theories and suggest areas for theory refinement.     

The 2020 presidential election and beliefs about fraud: Continuity or change?

The 2020 presidential campaign was plagued by charges of voter fraud both before and after the election took place. While past literature finds that electoral losers are most likely to express misgivings about election integrity, little else is known about the characteristics of individuals who exhibit these beliefs or how the beliefs have changed over time. Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, we examine the levels of pre-election expectations of fraud in the event of an electoral loss over time, as well as the individual-level correlates of beliefs in a range of election-related conspiracy theories prominent in 2020. Our analysis reveals that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship. Moreover, we find that, even accounting for the influence of partisan motivated reasoning, several psychological orientations––conspiracy thinking, anomie, dark triad personality traits, and denialism––play a unique role in promoting perceptions of voter fraud.     

Multiple meanings? The link between partisanship and definitions of voter fraud

Research on public perceptions of voter fraud often relies on items that gauge the frequency of noncitizen voting, double voting, and posing as someone else. Few studies explore the underlying sentiments that structure the concept of voter fraud and its meaning to people. Further, no study has examined whether these dominant survey items fully capture the ways in which people understand and articulate their views about voter fraud. We use original surveys with open-ended questions to explore public perceptions of voter fraud. With a combination of in-depth content analysis and text analysis, we find that individuals think of voter fraud as consisting of a wide array of actions being undertaken by a diverse set of actors. We also find substantial differences in the ways that Democrats and Republicans think about this issue. Our study provides important contributions to a growing literature on election administration and public opinion toward voter fraud.     

The normalization of intolerance: The 2019 presidential election in Indonesia

The perceived social acceptability of intolerance is believed to drive individual intolerance, a process we refer to as normalization. Social intolerance can be particularly high during election campaigns, when divisive candidates are likely to disparage minorities and outgroups in their rhetoric. Despite the electoral connection, it remains unclear how normalization interacts with partisanship. Does normalization only affect supporters of intolerant candidates, or does normalization spread across the population—even among supporters of the opposition? Relatedly, are the targets of intolerance group-specific, or are all minorities and outgroups at risk? To address these questions, this paper draws on results from a survey experiment conducted during the 2019 Indonesian presidential election. Our findings suggest that normalization affects all voters, albeit in ways that reflect partisan affiliation and rhetoric, which has implications for the study of identity politicization and the conditions under which intolerance is likely to propagate.     

Lokale Politik und die Sozialisation demokratischer Einstellungen in Europa

The legitimacy of European democracies is challenged by a fading away of their citizens’ support (see Putnam et al. 2000). This phenomenon of declining support might even become more severe when formerly national political competencies are moved away to supranational institutions like the European Union. In this situation the local level gains importance. Can local government be a “training-ground” for positive democratic attitudes that strengthens political support also at higher levels of government? And is local autonomy a tool to foster this support function of local politics? Using comparative survey data on local and national political attitudes in Europe as well as macro data on local autonomy these questions will be investigated. The results show a remarkable socialization function of local politics, which is especially strong concerning feelings of local political competence. However, positive effects from local autonomy that support this democratic support function of local politics are hardly to be found.     

The conditioning role of polarization in U.S. senate election outcomes: A direct-election era & voter-level analysis

Recent work finds that a decline in the incumbency advantage coincides with the rise of partisanship as a determinant of congressional electoral outcomes. While this work updates our view of congressional elections, it is unclear if this holds in the more candidate-centered and high-information electoral context of the U.S. Senate. In this paper, I address these two considerations by evaluating a theory positing that polarization conditions the influence of incumbency and partisanship as Senate election determinants. Using data on the entire direct-election Senate era and survey data, this paper finds that: (1) polarization provides a partisan advantage for candidates running in states in which they are members of the partisan majority and (2) polarization positively conditions the incumbency advantage for Senators representing states that favor the other party. These findings suggest that Senators may still successfully cultivate a personal brand in the face of growing ideological differences between the parties.