The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting: Panel Evidence from the 2016 U.S. Election

Political Behavior - Divisions between Whites and Blacks have long influenced voting. Yet given America’s growing Latino population, will Whites’ attitudes toward Blacks continue to...     

Issue avoidance: Evidence from the U.S. senate

This research considers whether there is evidence of legislators' issue avoidance, or unwillingness to reveal one's position. It links, for the first time, two important areas of inquiry: legislative decision making and issue avoidance. The data describe senatorial behavior over eighteen years, involving approximately 200,000 individual voting decisions. During that time, senators were polled by CQ after each missed roll call, and asked to indicate their positions. Issue avoidance is a subset of the nonresponses to that poll. A conceptual model of voting and position taking is presented, incorporating both behaviors and intentions. It defines two kinds of issue avoidance: proactive, deliberate avoidance at the time of the roll call, and reactive, avoidance decided on after votes missed inadvertently. Application of the model permits inferences about intent. Proactive avoidance accounts for 12% of nonvoting during the terms' first five years. It also represents 40% of failures to reveal positions. As much as another 19% of nonvoting results in reactive avoidance. A sixth-year increase in issue avoidance is indicated, although not conclusively. The findings strongly suggest that models of legislative voting should be amended to account for both proactive and reactive avoidance.     

Bread and Peace Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

A simple ``Bread and Peace'' model shows that aggregate votes forPresident in postwar elections were determined entirely byweighted-average growth of real disposable personal income percapita during the incumbent party's term and the cumulativenumbers of American military personnel killed in action as aresult of U.S. intervention in the Korean and Vietnamese civilwars. The model is subjected to robustness tests against twenty-two variations in functional form inspired by the extensiveliterature on presidential voting. Not one of these variationsadds value to the Bread and Peace model or significantly perturbsits coefficients.     

Strategic Voting in a U.S. Senate Election

Due to the strength of its two-party system, the opportunity for voters to strategically defect in favor of third party or independent candidates is rare in high profile American elections. Indeed, it has been almost a century since a third party candidate finished better than one of the major party presidential nominees—in 1912 Bull Moose Progressive Teddy Roosevelt finished ahead of Republican William H. Taft. In this study we examine strategic voting in a U.S. Senate election where the independent candidate also finished above one of the major party nominees. In the 2010 Florida Senate contest the sitting Governor Charlie Crist shed his Republican label in order to compete in the general election since he was certain to lose in the GOP primary to Marco Rubio, the eventual winner. Crist finished second by taking a substantial share of votes away from the third place candidate, Democrat Kendrick Meek. Because this type of contest seldom occurs, in American politics there is scant empirical research on strategic voting under these conditions. We employ an unobtrusive survey of a large sample of registered Floridians in order to assess the likelihood of strategic voting among respondents who preferred the Democrat Kendrick Meek. For voters who sincerely preferred the Democrat, a significant portion defected in favor of the Independent Charlie Crist if they expected him to finish ahead of Meek. Additionally, we find that after a major news story broke, in which former President Bill Clinton allegedly advised Meek to drop out of the race so that Crist might win, respondents surveyed after this event were more likely to vote strategically in favor of Crist. Our study clearly demonstrates the importance of political context. Under the appropriate conditions, we find a high likelihood of strategic voting.     

Correct Voting in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Nominating Elections

Criticisms of the system by which the American political parties select their candidates focus on issues of representativeness—how choices are dominated by relatively small numbers of ideologically extreme primary voters, or how residents of small states voting early in the process have disproportionate influence. This paper adds a different concern, albeit one that still addresses representativeness. How well do primary and caucus voters represent their own values and interests with their vote choices? Lau and Redlawsk’s notion of “correct voting” is applied to the 2008 U.S. nominating contests. Four reasons to expect levels of correct voting to be lower in caucus and primary elections than in general election campaigns are discussed. Results suggest that voters in U.S. nominating contests do much worse than voters in general election campaigns, often barely doing better than chance in selecting the candidate who best represents their own values and priorities. Discussion focuses on institutional reforms that should improve citizens’ ability to make correct voting choices in caucuses and primaries.     

Decentralization and Corruption: Evidence from U.S. Federal Transfer Programs

While some recent evidence suggests that more decentralizationis associated with reduced corruption, no empirical work hasexamined whether different types of decentralization havedifferential effects on corruption. The theoretical literaturehas emphasized that expenditure decentralization will only beeffective if accompanied by the devolution of revenuegeneration to local governments. In this paper we examine thishypothesis empirically, by studying the mismatch betweenrevenue generation and expenditure in U.S. states. Largerfederal transfers are associated with higher rates ofconviction for abuse of public office, supporting the theorythat soft-budget constraints created by federal transfers arepotentially problematic.     

Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States

Examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of presidential voting and electoral coalitions rely on national samples (e.g., the American National Election Studies). However, recent developments in the state party and electoral change literature suggest variation across the United States in the group bases of political coalitions and in the process of electoral adjustment. Moreover, the strategic implications of the electoral college suggest a focus on state electorates. We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states. Our results reveal noteworthy variation in the nature of group influences on presidential voting, in the composition of presidential electoral coalitions, and in cleavage structures across the states. This mapping exercise suggests limitations in theoretical and empirical accounts of presidential voting, political cleavage, and electoral change that do not accommodate the geopolitical diversity of the United States.     

Tax Base Composition and Revenue Volatility: Evidence from the U.S. States

This study examines the effect of tax base composition on revenue volatility, with focus on state general sales tax and individual income tax. In doing so, extensive historical data (1992–2007) are presented on state taxation of various categories of sales and incomes that exhibit wide cross‐state variations in taxable status, and revenue volatility is measured using the deviation‐from‐trend approach. Models of sales and income tax volatility are estimated using pooled OLS, and the analyses reveal that revenue volatility is significantly affected by how the tax base is composed. The paper concludes by discussing the policy implications of the results.     

On expressive voting: Evidence from the 1988 U.S. presidential election

People turn out to cast their votes simply because they want to ``cheer'' or ``boo'' their favored or unfavored candidates. This expressive voting behavior is in marked contrast to the instrumental voting behavior, i.e., people vote because they perceive voting as a means of achieving a particular election outcome. In this paper we report an econometric study on voting behavior that uses data from the 1988 American National Election Study. The results reveal that the ``cheering'' and ``booing'' effects are statistically significant, and that they exert substantial influence on bothturnout and voter choice. We also obtain evidence against theproposition that people turn out to vote because they considerthemselves to be potentially decisive with regard to the electionoutcome.     

The Partisan Origins of Economic Perceptions in a Weak Party System: Evidence from South Korea

Political Behavior - While political accountability requires that voters can form an accurate picture of government performance, public evaluations of government performance in established...     

Lobbying and regulation in a political economy: Evidence from the U.S. cellular industry

In this paper we empirically test the simultaneity between the effects and the determinants of price regulation in the U.S. mobile telecommunications industry. We find that the regulatory regime is endogenous to firms pricing strategies. Because of lobbying successfulness, firms avoided regulation in those markets where it would have been more effective. Therefore, regulation did not significantly reduce cellular tariffs in regulated markets but it would have decreased them if adopted in non-regulated ones. Also, we provide evidence that the choice of the regulatory regime strongly depends on the political as well as regulatory environments.     

Legislator Turnout and the Calculus of Voting: The Determinants of Abstention in the U.S. Congress

The belief that turnout and abstention depend on theinteraction of the benefits and costs of voting is oneof the longest held in public choice. The interplaybetween benefits and costs has typically been studiedwithin the context of voter turnout in elections, butthese results are confounded by the fact thatparticipation in such elections is a low-cost, low-benefit activity. Analysis of voting in legislatures,where the potential returns and costs to participantsare greater, is more promising. This paper examines participation on roll calls in theU.S. House of Representatives during the recent 104thCongress (1995–1996). We analyze all contested rollcalls during this two-year period, using a negativebinomial count model that accounts for legislatorheterogeneity, to determine what factors associatedwith such votes induce turnout. Our results suggestthat, while turnout is predictable, its primaryexplanation does not lie with our standard calculationof expected benefits. We find that the ideologicalpolarization of the roll call alternatives is not avery important factor for turnout and, even morestrikingly and contrary to what past analysis hasimplied, the likelihood of any given legislator beingpivotal is completely irrelevant. Rather, what is mostimportant is that a non-trivial number of members ofCongress decide not to vote when contextual factorsforce them to choose between electioneering andlegislating. Consequently, while our results are notsufficient to induce a full-fledged ``paradox ofcongressional voting'' analogous to that of massvoting, they do indicate that participation inCongress depends most heavily on factors beyond adesire to affect the outcome.     

Political environment and voluntary disclosure in the U.S.: Evidence from the Carbon Disclosure Project

We investigate whether the political leaning of the state where a given firm is headquartered is related to that firm's decision to voluntarily disclose climate change information. We study S&P 500 firms that were surveyed by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and find that firms headquartered in more Democratic states are more likely to disclose carbon emissions information to the CDP. Furthermore, firms in more Democratic states are more likely to permit public disclosure of their survey responses and tend to receive higher disclosure scores. We consider two political variables, one based on political power and one based on public political preference. Our results are consistent with political power driving the firm's willingness to voluntarily disclose information about climate change. These results suggest that the relation between the political environment and disclosure is more closely linked to concerns over regulatory threats as opposed to acquiescence to social norms.     

Economic Outcomes and Voting Behaviour in a Multi-Party System: An Application to the Netherlands

This paper is an empirical study to the effects of economic outcomes on party choice for the Netherlands. In the first part of the paper we employ a multinomial logit model to examine the links between voters' characteristics and party choice. The results suggest that there are long-run movements in party choice which are unlikely be the result of changing economic outcomes. In the second part, we use time series analysis to determine the effects of economic conditions on short-run and medium-run movements in votes shares. The estimations results provide support for the responsibility hypothesis and for the predictions of the partisan voter model that left-wing (right-wing) parties benefit (suffer) from favourable economic growth prospects.     

An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting —the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system.     

Distance and Voting: Evidence from Danish Municipalities

Living far from the assigned polling station possibly renders voting less convenient than if the polls are right around the corner. Using a cross‐sectional dataset of about 2.3 million potential voters, including the distances between each household and the assigned polling station, a substantial impact of distance on the propensity to vote is found. An individual living five kilometers from the polling station has a ten percentage‐point lower propensity to turnout than an individual living right next to it. The relationship between distance and turnout is found to be approximately logarithmic. Additionally, the impact of distance appears to be conditional on the availability of cars in the household. The policy implications of the results are discussed in the concluding section.     

Ideology and Vote Choice in U.S. Mayoral Elections: Evidence from Facebook Surveys

City elections in the U.S. are widely thought to be low-information contests decided by non-ideological factors. This consensus casts doubt on the possibility of electoral accountability in cities, and renders recent evidence of municipal responsiveness puzzling. However, our knowledge of how voters actually behave in local elections is severely limited by a lack of individual-level survey data collected from local contests. Using three such original surveys, I re-examine the role of ideology in mayoral elections, recruiting samples of local voters via geotargeted Facebook advertisements. In two large cities, I find ideology is a powerful and independent predictor of vote choice. Using a panel design, I find voters learn the relative ideological positions of candidates over the course of a campaign, and that learning causally impacts vote choice. The effect of ideology also replicates in a conjoint experiment fielded to a sample of small-city voters in another region. Electoral accountability is thus a plausible explanation for ideological responsiveness in U.S. cities, and the methodological tools introduced here can now be applied to a variety of questions about local voter behavior.     

Responsiveness without Representation: Evidence from Minimum Wage Laws in U.S. States

How well does public policy represent mass preferences in U.S. states? Current approaches provide an incomplete account of statehouse democracy because they fail to compare preferences and policies on meaningful scales. Here, we overcome this problem by generating estimates of Americans' preferences on the minimum wage and compare them to observed policies both within and across states. Because we measure both preferences and policies on the same scale (U.S. dollars), we can quantify both the association of policy outcomes with preferences across states (responsiveness) and their deviation within states (bias). We demonstrate that while minimum wages respond to corresponding preferences across states, policy outcomes are more conservative than preferences in each state, with the average policy bias amounting to about two dollars. We also show that policy bias is substantially smaller in states with access to direct democratic institutions.