Opinion Polls,Coalition Signals and Strategic Voting: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Recent studies find that defection from one's most preferred party to some other party is as common under proportional representation (PR) as it is in plurality systems. It is less elaborated how election‐specific contextual factors affect strategic vote choice under PR. This study looks at the impact of two potentially important contextual factors: parties’ coalition signals about cooperation with other parties (referred to as ‘pre‐electoral coalitions’) and polling information, which vary from one election to the next. The focus is strategic voting for smaller parties at risk of falling below an electoral threshold. The hypothesis is that parties that are included in well‐defined coalitions will benefit from strategic ‘insurance’ votes if the polls show that they have support slightly below the threshold. However, smaller parties that do not belong to a coalition would be less likely to benefit from insurance votes. Extensive survey experiments with randomized coalition signals and polls give support to the idea that a voter's tendency to cast an insurance vote depends on whether the polls show support below or above the threshold and whether the party is included in a coalition or not.     

Perceptions of Public and Private Performance: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Media, politicians, and reform proponents frequently assert that public sector organizations are inefficient and burdened by administrative procedures. But are negative stereotypes of the public sector reflected in people's perceptions of public service provision? Given the methodological challenges of isolating the perception of publicness from other factors related to public organizations, little is known about whether public organizations have a negative image. The authors use a survey experimental design to isolate the effect of publicness on perceptions of the performance of hospitals. The results suggest that public sector organizations have a negative image on productivity‐related aspects of performance but not on normative aspects of performance. As this article is a randomized experiment, it provides strong evidence regarding the causal nature of the relationship between publicness and perceptions of performance. Implications for researchers aiming to understand these mechanisms and for public managers concerned about the image of their organization are discussed.     

The Power of Partisanship in Brazil: Evidence from Survey Experiments

To what extent do party labels influence individuals’ policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the United States, where party identification can generate both in‐group and out‐group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented party system. In such an environment, do parties function as in‐groups, out‐groups, or neither? We answer this question through two survey experiments, one conducted on a nationally representative sample and another on a convenience sample recruited via Facebook. We find that both in‐ and out‐group cues shape the opinions of identifiers of Brazil's two main parties but that cues have no effect on nonpartisans. Results suggest that party identification can structure attitudes and behavior even in “party‐averse” electoral environments.     

Exploiting a Rare Communication Shift to Document the Persuasive Power of the News Media

Using panel data and matching techniques, we exploit a rare change in communication flows—the endorsement switch to the Labour Party by several prominent British newspapers before the 1997 United Kingdom general election—to study the persuasive power of the news media. These unusual endorsement switches provide an opportunity to test for news media persuasion while avoiding methodological pitfalls that have plagued previous studies. By comparing readers of newspapers that switched endorsements to similar individuals who did not read these newspapers, we estimate that these papers persuaded a considerable share of their readers to vote for Labour. Depending on the statistical approach, the point estimates vary from about 10% to as high as 25% of readers. These findings provide rare evidence that the news media exert a powerful influence on mass political behavior.     

Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.     

Welfare Nationalism and Popular Support for Raising the Child Allowance: Evidence from a Norwegian Survey Experiment

Refugee and labour immigration have placed the issue of immigrants’ access to welfare benefits high on the political agenda. This article explores how voter preferences for increases in the child benefit change when respondents are reminded about immigrants’ access to benefits. The survey experiment shows that information about newly arrived immigrants’ access to child benefit has only a small impact on support for increasing the child allowance. By contrast, information about labour migrants’ access to benefits for children living in another European Union country has a strong impact, and the observed sensitivity to this cue is not to the same extent confined to respondents who otherwise support welfare dualism.     

Corruption as a Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.     

Activating the Forces of Public Service Motivation: Evidence from a Low‐Intensity Randomized Survey Experiment

Employees with higher public service motivation (PSM) are likely to perform better in public service jobs. However, research on how practitioners may capitalize on this knowledge is sparse. This article expands the understanding of how to activate employee PSM, which is understood as a human resource that is present in the work environment. Using a randomized survey experiment with 528 law students, this article shows how low‐intensity treatments may activate PSM and how the effect of PSM activation efforts compares with efforts to activate another, less self‐determined type of motivation (relating to the need for feelings of self‐importance). The findings are robust and suggest that low‐intensity efforts to activate PSM have a positive effect on an individual's behavioral inclinations. However, efforts toward the activation of motivation relating to feelings of self‐importance appear to engender an effect of similar size.     

Toward a physician payment policy: Evidence from the Economic Stabilization Program

Concern over the rising cost of medical care has focused policy attention on methods of paying physicians. Unfortunately, limits placed on fees paid by public medical care financing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, adversely affect those programs' primary objective: making office-based physicians' services available to the poor and the elderly at affordable prices. This suggests that a second policy instrument, controls on physicians' private charges, may be needed. The Economic Stabilization Program (ESP) provides the only recent U.S. experience with a system which constrained both physicians' private charges and public payments. Using Medicare and Medicaid claims data for a large sample of California physicians, we simulate what physicians' private charges and supplies of services to Medicare assignment and Medicaid patients would have been in the absence of ESP. The simulations suggest that without ESP, private charges would have been higher and the quantities of services provided to poor and elderly patients lower than were actually observed. We believe, therefore, that the ESP experience supports the argument that controls over both public and private fees are needed in order to simultaneously contain costs of and maintain access to physicians' services by Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.The research for this paper was supported by Contract No. 600-76-0054 from the Social Security Administration, USDHEW. We wish to thank our colleagues Judith Feder, John Holahan, William Scanlon, and Judith Wagner for their helpful comments. James Bluck provided excellent research assistance. The findings and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of either The Urban Institute or The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.     

The Effect of Information on Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Do better‐informed people vote more? Recent formal theories of voter turnout emphasize a positive effect of being informed on the propensity to vote, but the possibility of endogenous information acquisition makes estimation of causal effects difficult. I estimate the causal effects of being informed on voter turnout using unique data from a natural experiment Copenhagen referendum on decentralization. Four of fifteen districts carried out a pilot project, exogenously making pilot city district voters more informed about the effects of decentralization. Empirical estimates based on survey data confirm a sizeable and statistically significant causal effect of being informed on the propensity to vote.     

Correction to: The Effect of Language on Political Appeal: Results from a Survey Experiment in Thailand

Political Behavior - The original version of this article unfortunately contained a typo in Introduction section. Indonesian presidential candidate name is Prabowo Subianto instead it was submitted...     

The Effect of Language on Political Appeal: Results from a Survey Experiment in Thailand

Political Behavior - Politicians have long engaged in marketing themselves by employing distinct speaking styles to signal social standing, competence, or a shared background with their audience....     

The Impact of Procedural Information Costs on Voting: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Chile

This paper uses a natural experiment to identify the effect of a procedural information cost on the electoral registration of young first-time voters. We exploit the fact that information about when the minimum age eligibility requirement is due, either at registration or election-day, is only meaningful for those turning 18 after registration closing day. Using a national dataset on Chilean registration over four elections, we provide evidence of a sharp discontinuity in the registration rate of those youngsters turning 18 at closing date. The effect is both sizable and robust, persists over time, and is similar across income groups.     

The Impact of Prenatal Exposure to Power Plant Emissions on Birth Weight: Evidence from a Pennsylvania Power Plant Located Upwind of New Jersey

To examine the infant health impact of prenatal exposure to power plant emissions, we draw scientific evidence on the impacted region downwind of a large polluter, a coal‐fired power plant located on the border of two states and proven to be the sole contributor to the violation of air quality standards of the impacted region. Our results show that among all live singleton births that occurred during 1990 through 2006, those born to mothers living as far as 20 to 30 miles away downwind from the power plant (which is also an affluent region) during pregnancy are at greater risks of low birth weight (LBW) and very low birth weight (VLBW): the likelihoods of LBW and VLBW could increase approximately by 6.50 and 17.12 percent, respectively. In light of the continual efforts of The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in reducing cross‐state air pollution caused by transboundary power plant emissions, our study is aimed at broadening the scope of cross‐border pollution impact analysis by taking into account adverse infant health effects of upwind polluters, which can impose disproportionate burdens of health risks on downwind states due to air pollutants transported by wind.     

The Effects of Doing More with Less in the Public Sector: Evidence from a Large‐Scale Survey

Since the onset of the Great Recession, “doing more with less” has become a policy mantra. To do more with less, a range of governments have concurrently imposed wage cuts and greater work demands on public employees. This article assesses the impact of these changes on the job satisfaction and work motivation of public employees in 34 European countries. Congruent with previous studies linking income and working hours with job attitudes, the article finds a negative impact on both. There are no free austerity lunches: while public employees may work longer hours for lower pay, they are less satisfied and less motivated when doing so. One caveat applies: the effect on motivation—although not satisfaction—is mitigated when employees feel that their values are aligned with those of their organization. This puts a premium on public managers fostering value alignment, particularly when it is hardest to achieve: in times of cutbacks.     

Media News Evaluation and Welfare Retrenchment: The Untransparent Cutbacks of the Housing Allowance

Radical welfare cutbacks normally only occur if there is obfuscation and citizens do not notice the changes. However, the media can potentially make untransparent events known and understandable to citizens. The role of the media in welfare retrenchment has not been sufficiently theorised or studied. This article attempts to partly remedy this. Research on media's news evaluation has not been in vogue lately. The literature largely has an anecdotal or atheoretical character. Here two dimensions are identified that underlay many of the news factors on the existing checklists: form and substance. Contrary to most existing research, this article focuses on an important political topic that has not had media coverage. Such a bias is a democratic problem per se. Social policy cutbacks offer an indicator upon which one can argue that there is a mismatch between the importance of an event and the media coverage it has received. The case studies of media coverage of cutbacks discussed in this article show that the media did not expose governmental blame‐avoiding behaviour, but there is evidence that media's news evaluation gave priority to transparent events whether they were important or not. Almost nothing was written on the untransparent cutbacks of the housing allowances, but the media covered the relatively insignificant, but very transparent, repayment of the housing allowance very much. Interviews with a number of important journalists regarding their news evaluation of these events substantiate the importance of transparency for press coverage. The implication is that obfuscation of cutbacks is indeed a useful governmental strategy.