Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism

Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.     

Elections and Deceptions: An Experimental Study on the Behavioral Effects of Democracy

Traditionally, the virtue of democratic elections has been seen in their role as means of screening and sanctioning shirking public officials. This article proposes a novel rationale for elections and political campaigns considering that candidates incur psychological costs of lying, in particular from breaking campaign promises. These nonpecuniary costs imply that campaigns influence subsequent behavior, even in the absence of reputational or image concerns. Our lab experiments reveal that promises are more than cheap talk. They influence the behavior of both voters and their representatives. We observe that the electorate is better off when their leaders are elected democratically rather than being appointed exogenously—but only in the presence of electoral campaigns. In addition, we find that representatives are more likely to serve the public interest when their approval rates are high. Altogether, our results suggest that elections and campaigns confer important benefits beyond their screening and sanctioning functions.     

Presidential Saber Rattling and the Economy

Saber rattling is a prominent tool of the U.S. president's foreign policy leadership. Yet there has been no study of how presidential saber rattling affects international or domestic political outcomes. This study evaluates how presidential saber rattling affects U.S. economic behavior and performance. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that presidential rhetoric affects the risks that economic actors are willing to take, as well as the consequences of these resulting behaviors for U.S. economic performance. Using monthly time series running from January 1978 through January 2005, vector autoregression methods are applied to show that increased presidential saber rattling produces increased perceptions of negative economic news, declining consumer confidence, lower personal consumption expenditures, less demand for money, and slower economic growth. More broadly, the study demonstrates an important linkage between the president's two most important roles: foreign and economic policy leadership. The president's foreign policy pronouncements not only impact other nations, but also affect domestic economic outcomes.     

Advances in the Study of Political Advertising

One of the biggest recent advances in the study of political advertising has been the availability of systematic sources of data on when and where ads air—and their content. In this piece, we review the various data sources that scholars have used to study political advertising, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. We then discuss recent studies that have employed data on political advertising to examine the effects of ad exposure on citizens' attitudes and political behaviors, how the content of advertising varies, and how ads have been targeted in recent political campaigns. We follow that with our own empirical contribution—an analysis of trends in advertising content, including negativity and policy focus—over the past 16 years.     

Learning More from Political Communication Experiments: Pretreatment and Its Effects

Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 25 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. Virtually all of these studies pay scant attention to events that occur prior to the experiment—that is, in “pretreatment events.” In this article, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment affects experimental outcomes. We present two studies—one where we control the pretreatment environment and one where it naturally occurred—to show how pretreatment effects can influence experimental outcomes. We argue that, under certain conditions, attending to pretreatment dynamics leads to novel insights, including a more accurate portrait of the pliability of the mass public and the identification of potentially two groups of citizens—what we call malleability reactive and dogmatic.     

The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm‐Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution

We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census‐type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti‐Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises—three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.     

The Political (and Economic) Origins of Consumer Confidence

Economic conditions, the story usually goes, influence consumer confidence, which in turn influences both political evaluations and votes. But we have little sense of the origins of consumer confidence itself. It is generally assumed that monthly reports of the nation's level of consumer confidence respond to objective economic conditions. We argue that politics is important for understanding consumer sentiment beyond what we know from economic conditions. Specifically, we demonstrate a direct effect of political evaluations of the president's management of the economy, the party of the president, extraordinary political events, and monetary policy, as well as an indirect effect of media coverage of the economy, on consumer sentiment, after controlling for economic conditions. When news coverage is positive, citizens give favorable evaluations, leading to more positive sentiment. Our findings suggest that understanding the political economy requires an emphasis on the causal effect of politics as well as economics.     

Do Parents’ Life Experiences Affect the Political and Civic Participation of Their Children? The Case of Draft-Induced Military Service

Myriad studies show that politically-salient events influence civic and political engagement. Yet, on the other hand, decades of research indicate that familial factors mold political and civic dispositions early in life, before an individual experiences political events outside the family. Viewing these two lines of research together, we ask if individuals’ political and civic dispositions might be influenced not solely by their own experiences, but, also, by the experiences of those individuals who create their family environment—namely, their parents. Do parents’ life experiences—before the birth of their children—affect their offspring’s public engagement? To answer that question, we examine how the assignment of military service, via the Vietnam-era Selective Service Lotteries, affected rates of public participation among the children of draft-eligible men. Our analysis finds a negative relationship between a father’s probability of draft-induced military service and his offspring’s public participation. In addition to highlighting how parents’ life experiences can influence the social behavior of their children, this finding challenges the prevailing view that the Vietnam conflict did not contribute to declining civic engagement and it shows how experiences within bureaucratic institutions can yield long-standing effects on politically-relevant behaviors.     

Political Awareness, Opinion Constraint and the Stability of Ideological Positions

Some studies of public opinion suggest that most people are ignorant about the detail of politics and are simply unable to arrive at a considered vote. They hold that voters are ignorant about the ideological substance of politics, since their opinions do not appear to be constrained by ideas and are unstable over time. However, other studies cast doubt on both the definition of ideology employed in these studies and their operational measures. It is suggested that, once allowance is made for measurement error, the opinions of most voters are constrained and highly stable. This article demonstrates that differences in political awareness result in considerable heterogeneity among the electorate. The opinions of more aware voters are subject to greater constraint and are more stable over time than those of less aware voters. It is therefore suggested that issue-voting models must be applied with caution to less aware voters.     

A Political Outlier: the Distinct Politics of the Millennial Generation

The generation one comes of age politically is an important determinant in one’s political identity. As a result, there is the potential for a disparity of the vote choice among different generations. Today, the youngest generation of American adults—the so-called Millennial Generation—have developed distinct political leanings that are significantly to the left of older generations Since Millennials have achieved adulthood and gained the right to vote the generation has consistently been a generational outlier. The strong pro-Democratic vote of the Millennials has its roots in the generation being both very pro-Obama and very anti-Bush. The Millennials support for the Democratic Party, however, is also due to the generation’s liberal views on policy that are a product of Millennials’ relative diversity, high education levels, global perspective on politics, and lack of religiosity. The huge generation gap that has emerged since Millennials have entered the electorate suggests that there is an emerging realignment of the electorate along generational lines. With generational replacement, Millennials thus have the potential to alter the direction of American politics.     

Who supports tax limitations: Evidence from massachusetts' proposition 2½

The vote on Massachusetts' Proposition 2½—and by extension the votes to restrain or roll back taxes in other states as well—should not be interpreted simply as expressions of the narrowly defined self-interest of the voters. This study shows that other characteristics such as sex, race, religion, occupation, educational background, and political orientation also have an important influence on voting behavior. These characteristics combine with self-interest measures such as public sector employment and voters' likely gains from tax reduction to push individual voters in different directions on the issue of tax limitation. Consequently, we find little polarization in the electorate along demographic lines.     

Does polarization affect even the inattentive? Assessing the relationship between political sophistication,policy orientations,and elite cues

In this paper we focus on how individuals’ level of political sophistication conditions how they respond to growing elite polarization. The party coalitions in the electorate have become increasingly ideologically sorted. We assess whether all citizens have sorted into the ideologically “correct” partisan camp or whether this phenomenon is limited only to the highly sophisticated. Using a combination of ANES and DW-NOMINATE data we show that individuals of all sophistication levels have become more likely to identify with and vote for the party that best matches their policy orientations as a function of increasing elite-level polarization. Our findings suggest that the effects of increasing polarization are felt throughout the electorate.     

Political pressure deflection

Much economic policy is deliberately shifted away from direct political processes to administrative processes—political pressure deflection. Pressure deflection poses a puzzle to standard political economy models which suggest that having policies to ‘sell’ is valuable to politicians. The puzzle is solved here by showing that incumbents will favor pressure deflection since it can deter viability of a challenger, essentially like entry deterrence. U.S. trade policy since 1934 provides a prime example, especially antidumping law and its evolution.     

Business as Usual? Economic Responses to Political Tensions

Do political tensions harm economic relations? Theories claim that trade prevents war and political relations motivate trade, but less is known about whether smaller shifts in political relations impact economic exchange. Looking at two major economies, we show that negative events have not hurt U.S. or Japanese trade or investment flows. We then examine specific incidents of tensions in U.S.‐French and Sino‐Japanese relations over the past decade—two case pairs that allow us to compare varying levels of political tension given high existing economic interdependence and different alliance relations. Aggregate economic flows and high salience sectors like wine and autos are unaffected by the deterioration of political relations. In an era of globalization, actors lack incentives to link political and economic relations. We argue that sunk costs in existing trade and investment make governments, firms, and consumers unlikely to change their behavior in response to political disputes.     

What’s in a poll? Incentives for truthful reporting in pre-election opinion surveys

We examine the ability of pre-election polls to aggregate information about voter preferences. We show that if the electorate is small and voting costs are negligible, then an equilibrium exists in which citizens report their true political preferences. If the electorate is large or voting costs are significant, however, then no such equilibrium exists because poll respondents possess incentives to influence the voting behavior of others by misreporting their true preferences. We find that when a truthful equilibrium does exist, a poll can raise expected welfare by discouraging turnout among members of the minority.     

Revisiting the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge

Gender-based differences in political knowledge are pervasive in the United States and abroad. Previous research on the source of these differences has focused on resource differentials or instrumentation, with scholars arguing either that the gender gap is real and intractable, or that it is an artifact of the way the concept is measured. Our study differs from past work by showing that (1) male–female differences in political knowledge persist even when knowledge is measured with recommended practices, but that (2) knowledge gaps can be ameliorated. Across laboratory, survey, and natural experiments, we document how exposure to information diminishes gender-based differences in political knowledge. The provision of facts reduces—and often eliminates—the gender gap in political knowledge on questions covering a range of topics.     

Political Institutions and Pollution: Evidence from Coal‐Fired Power Generation

What is the relationship between political institutions and air pollution generated by the power sector? Here we focus on the association between democracy and power generated from coal, the most polluting of all fossil fuels. Using a new dataset on coal‐fired power plants commissioned between 1980 and 2016 in 71 countries, we find that the relationship between democracy and coal varies according to the environmental Kuznets curve logic. Democratic political institutions at lower levels of economic development are correlated with increased commissioning of coal power plants, as governments seek to appeal to an electorate prioritizing economic growth and affordable energy access. As a country becomes richer, democracy comes to have a negative association with coal power, as clean air becomes a more salient issue for the public.     

Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new light on heterogeneity in economic elites' political preferences, arguing that economic elites from an industry can share distinctive preferences due in part to sharing distinctive predispositions. Consequently, how increases in economic elites' influence affect inequality depends on which industry's elites are gaining influence and which policy issues are at stake. We demonstrate our argument with four original surveys, including the two largest political surveys of American economic elites to date: one of technology entrepreneurs—whose influence is burgeoning—and another of campaign donors. We show that technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies—a bundle of preferences rare among other economic elites. These differences appear to arise partly from their distinctive predispositions.     

Responsibility attribution in coalition governments: Evidence from Germany

Models of coalition governance suggest that political parties pursue the interests of their electorate through the ministerial control of policy in their portfolios. Yet, little is known whether voters reward or punish coalition parties for policy performance in their portfolios. This study investigates voters’ evaluations of the policy priorities of coalition parties and their responsibility attribution in twenty policy areas using survey data from Germany. Specifically, we investigate whether voters attribute policy responsibility equally across coalition parties, along the jurisdictional lines of ministerial portfolios, or to the dominant party in the coalition. Our findings suggest that party size, prime minister status, and ministerial portfolios are decisive for responsibility attribution.     

Risk Attitudes and Political Participation

This article contributes to existing explanations of political participation by proposing that citizens’ attitudes towards risk predict participation. I argue that people who are risk accepting participate in political life because politics offers novelty and excitement. Analyses of two independent Internet surveys establish a positive, significant relationship between risk attitudes and general political participation. The analyses also suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and action varies with the political act: people who are more risk accepting are more likely to participate in general political acts, but they are no more or less likely to turn out in elections. Further analyses suggest that two key mechanisms—novelty seeking and excitement seeking—underlie the relationship between risk attitudes and political participation.