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.

     

Economic Perceptions and Vote Choice: Disentangling the Endogeneity

Much previous research shows that variation in vote choice closely follows variation in economic perceptions over time. A number of scholars argue that the pattern is rooted in cross-sectional effects and have found apparent evidence of such effects. However, most of these studies do not take into account the possibility that economic perceptions are themselves structured by vote choice, which poses potentially serious implications. We begin to address this endogeneity, focusing specifically on Lewis-Beck's (1988) analysis of economic voting. The results suggest that the cross-sectional effects of the economy on vote choice have been substantially overstated.     

Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980–2002

Research on the voters of the extreme right in Western Europe has become a minor industry, but relatively little attention has been paid to the twin question of why support for these parties is often unstable, and why the extreme right is so weak in many countries. Moreover, the findings from different studies often contradict each other. This article aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modeling strategy. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for.     

Iraq the Vote: Retrospective and Prospective Foreign Policy Judgments on Candidate Choice and Casualty Tolerance

In this article, we model the effect of foreign policy attitudes on both vote choice and casualty tolerance, using survey data collected during the 2004 election. We show that prospective judgments of the likelihood of success in Iraq and retrospective judgments of whether the war in Iraq was right are significant determinants of both vote choice and casualty tolerance. The prospective judgment of success is key in predicting casualty tolerance, while retrospective judgment of whether the war was right takes precedence in determining vote choice. In addition, there is an important interaction between the two variables, so the effect of one is conditional on the value of the other. We believe this is compelling evidence that foreign policy matters, and that it matters in reasonable ways.

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.

     

Consideration Sets and Political Choices: A Heterogeneous Model of Vote Choice and Sub-national Party Strength

This paper brings to political science a new decision-making model based on research in consumer behavior. Individuals do not necessarily make choices from the universe of alternatives; rather, they choose from a “consideration set,” a notion derived from both utility maximization and information processing theories. Here I apply a model of heterogeneous consideration sets to voting in the 2000 Mexican national election. I argue that the sub-national variation in the strength of Mexican parties leads to heterogeneous consideration sets, resulting in individuals with identical issue preferences and personal attributes making different voting decisions. Application of this model provides both interesting substantive conclusions about vote choice in Mexico and a more general theoretical innovation regarding vote choice.

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.     

Electoral Systems, Campaign Strategies, and Vote Choice in the Ukrainian Parliamentary and Presidential Elections of 1994

In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of 1994 the Communist party gained the greatest number of seats, yet the presidential election of the same year was won by a liberal reformer, Leonid Kuchma. The question arises as to how within a period of only a few months the Ukrainian electorate could have brought about such divergent results. This article addresses the question with reference to the workings of the Ukrainian electoral systems. It argues firstly, that the systems governing the two types of election created distinctive incentive structures for campaign strategy which interacted with the structure of preferences of the electorate in different ways, and secondly, that majoritarian aggregative formulae had different effects in the two sets of elections.     

Contextual Effects on Retrospective Economic Evaluations The Impact of the State and Local Economy

The theoretical premise of this study is that individual retrospective evaluations of the national economy, which have a clear impact on voting behavior in national elections, are influenced not only by the national economy but also by the state and local economic context. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing the effect that the unemployment rate in the individual's state and community has on the individual's retrospective evaluation of the national unemployment situation in 1992, using data from the 1992 American National Election Study survey, supplemented with data on the unemployment rate during the third quarter of 1992 for the respondent's community and state. The findings show that the state unemployment rate has a clear effect on retrospective evaluations of national economic conditions. This effect occurs apart from any effect on fear of unemployment, which is unaffected by the state unemployment rate. The community unemployment rate has little or no effect on retrospective economic evaluations, except for a small impact on personal unemployment experience. The contextual effect that we observe therefore is primarily sociotropic, not personal pocketbook, in nature. We suggest that the contextual patterning of information, perhaps especially through media reporting of economic conditions, is responsible for producing this effect.     

Campaign Learning and Vote Determinants

How campaigns shape voters' decisions is central to the study of political behavior. The basic conclusion is simple: campaigns matter. While we know who campaigns influence, there is no clear empirical evidence of why or how campaigns matter. This comes from two things. First, despite different theories about campaigns, the existing studies measure the campaign as a function of time. Second, these studies ignore the individual-level psychological mediators of these effects. We know that there are differences across time during a campaign, but we do not know how or why. In this article I suggest that campaigns work by altering voters' uncertainty about the candidates and combine aggregate and individual-level data using a hierarchical logit estimated via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. I find that voters change how they weigh their attitudes during the campaign because of changes in their uncertainty about the candidates.     

Perceptions of Immigrant Threat,American Identity,and Vote Choice in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Among the central tenets of social identity theory are the arguments that individuals’ attitudes and behavior are shaped by (1) perceptions of threat by out-groups toward individuals’ in-group(s) and (2) the strength of individuals’ identification with the in-group perceived to be under threat. In this paper we explore how American identity and Americans’ perceptions of immigrant threat work together to shape their vote choices in the 2016 presidential election. With the presidential campaign of Donald Trump characterized by strong rhetoric that emphasized immigrant threat and American identity themes, we suggest that the effects of immigrant threat perceptions are amplified by individuals’ American identity, with those who have a strong American identity more likely to translate immigrant threat perceptions into support for Trump than those with weaker levels of American identity. Moreover, we consider whether the effects of American identity on vote choice are activated and moderated by individuals’ perceptions of immigrant threat. Using data from the 2016 American National Election Study, we find that the effects of immigrant threat perceptions and American identity on vote choice are magnified by each other: the effects of immigrant threat perceptions are enhanced among individuals with a strong American identity, and the effects of American identity are activated and magnified by perceptions of immigrant threat.

     

The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice

Political Behavior - A prominent explanation for why women are significantly underrepresented in public office in the U.S. is that stereotypes lead voters to favor male candidates over female...     

Rolling off the Tongue into the Top-of-the-Head: Explaining Language Effects on Public Opinion

Growing evidence shows that mass opinion varies by interview language, yet modest theory exists to explain this result. I propose a framework where language impacts survey response by making some political concepts more mentally accessible. I claim that concepts vary by how associated they are with certain languages, which means people are more likely to acquire a construct when it is tied to the tongue one speaks. Hence, recalling concepts from memory should be easier when the language a construct is linked to matches the tongue one interviews in, thereby intensifying people’s opinions. I test my theory by manipulating the interview language in two U.S. surveys of English/Spanish bilingual Latino adults. I generally find that language influences the accessibility of concepts. For example, subjects report higher opinion levels for concepts that are tied more to their interview language, such as American identity among English interviewees. Subjects who interview in English are also less likely to refuse completing items measuring knowledge about U.S. politics, and more likely to answer them quickly. Items reflecting constructs that are highly labile (e.g. anti-Obama affect) or very crystallized (e.g., partisanship) do not display these patterns. I then rule out that language effects are mostly mediated by a heightened sense of anxiety, anger, pride or efficacy that emerges when bilingual subjects interview in one of their languages.     

Vote trading: An experimental study

This essay reports the results of ninety 3-person and 5-person bargaining experiments using several alternative vote trading scenarios. These experiments are designed to test: (1) Riker and Brams' controversial hypothesis that vote trading can yield inferior outcomes as against the alternative hypothesis that vote trading induces ‘market-like’ efficiency in voting bodies; (2) the relative adequacy of several game theoretic solution concepts for vote trading games without a Condorcet winner (core); and, (3) the adequacy of the core itself. First, on the basis of eighteen experiments with binding commitments, we find some support for Riker and Brams' hypothesis: in nine trials, subjects first trade to a Pareto dominated outcome. In five of these trials, however, these outcomes are eventually displaced by Pareto efficient ones. Without binding commitments, however, we find little support for the ‘paradox of vote trading’ hypothesis. Specifically, while six of seven trials of a 3-person game yield ‘equitable’ outcomes, seventeen trials of several 5-person games without binding commitments strongly support the competitive solution as a cooperative game solution concept, and suggest that the V-set and M ₁ bargaining set are either redundant or useless. Seven trials each of six 5-person games with a condorcet winner (core), however, suggest that usual static solution concepts may be inadequate for treating games with any interesting degree of strategic complexity.