An Empirical Validation Study of Popular Survey Methodologies for Sensitive Questions

When studying sensitive issues, including corruption, prejudice, and sexual behavior, researchers have increasingly relied upon indirect questioning techniques to mitigate such known problems of direct survey questions as underreporting and nonresponse. However, there have been surprisingly few empirical validation studies of these indirect techniques because the information required to verify the resulting estimates is often difficult to access. This article reports findings from the first comprehensive validation study of indirect methods. We estimate whether people voted for an anti‐abortion referendum held during the 2011 Mississippi General Election using direct questioning and three popular indirect methods: list experiment, endorsement experiment, and randomized response. We then validate these estimates against the official election outcome. While direct questioning leads to significant underestimation of sensitive votes against the referendum, indirect survey techniques yield estimates much closer to the actual vote count, with endorsement experiment and randomized response yielding the least bias.     

How Politicians Discount the Opinions of Constituents with Whom They Disagree

We argue that politicians systematically discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree and that this “disagreement discounting” is a contributing factor to ideological incongruence. A pair of survey experiments where state and local politicians are the subjects of interest show that public officials rationalize this behavior by assuming that constituents with opposing views are less informed about the issue. This finding applies both to well‐established issues that divide the parties as well as to nonpartisan ones. Further, it cannot be explained by politicians’ desires to favor the opinions of either copartisans or likely voters. A third survey experiment using a sample of voters shows that the bias is exacerbated by an activity central to representative governance—taking and explaining one's policy positions. This suggests that the job of being a representative exacerbates this bias.     

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.     

England,Englishness and Brexit

In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration, with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the UK's most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign, we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an ‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence‐base, to trace the development of attitudes to Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland will exacerbate tensions in the UK's territorial constitution and could lead to the break‐up of Britain.     

A Tale of One City: The Devo Manc Deal and Its Implications for English Devolution

On 2 November 2014 George Osborne stood in the impressive great council chamber of Manchester town hall and, flanked by the ten leaders of Greater Manchester's local authorities, announced a devolution deal for the city‐region. Greater Manchester would receive a significant package of powers over transport, housing, planning, skills, business support and welfare in exchange for creating new governance structures, including a directly elected mayor for the city‐region. This article explores the background to the Devo Manc deal, arguing that it is the product of both a long history of local government collaboration in Greater Manchester and George Osborne's desire for a sweeping restructure of English governance. It traces how the key decisions were taken quickly and by a small number of key officials. The article also identifies some flaws in Devo Manc and considers whether it is an appropriate model for other city‐regions in the UK.     

Unresponsive and Unpersuaded: The Unintended Consequences of a Voter Persuasion Effort

To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. In this paper, we analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 presidential election. Focusing on the canvassing treatment, we find that persuasive appeals had two unintended consequences. First, they reduced responsiveness to a follow-up survey among infrequent voters, a substantively meaningful behavioral response that has the potential to induce bias in estimates of persuasion effects as well. Second, the persuasive appeals possibly reduced candidate support and almost certainly did not increase it. This counterintuitive finding is reinforced by multiple statistical methods and suggests that contact by a political campaign may engender a backlash.     

Asymmetric federalism and economic voting

Although federal arrangements adopt a multiplicity of forms across and within federations, this article suggests that some models of power division are better than others at enhancing clarity of responsibility and electoral accountability. This conclusion is the result of exploring responsibility attribution and economic voting in a state where decentralisation arrangements vary across regions: the Spanish State of Autonomies. Using electoral surveys and aggregated economic data for the 1982–2012 period, the empirical analysis shows that regional economic voting is most pronounced in regions where decentralisation design concentrated authority and resources at one level of government, whereas it is inexistent in regions where devolution followed a more intertwined model of power distribution. The implication of the empirical findings is that the specific design of intergovernmental arrangements is crucial to make electoral accountability work in federations.     

Enhancing Precision and Clarity in the Study of Policy Narratives: An Analysis of Climate and Air Issues in Delhi,India

The study of policy narratives is challenged by inconsistencies and a need for more precise definitions and measurements. The goals of this article are to build precision and clarity in the study of policy narratives by developing a network‐based approach—the ego‐alter dyad—for coding characters and their interactions around a policy issue and then to illustrate this approach in the analysis of air and climate issues in Delhi, India. The empirical results show that (1) the same actors are often heroes and villains, (2) heroes and villains are associated with different actions but with similar victims or beneficiaries, (3) narrators differ in their propensity to tell hero‐heavy or villain‐heavy policy narratives, and (4) the proportion of hero‐heavy or villain‐heavy policy narratives changes over time and differs across subtopics. The article concludes with a research agenda for further theoretical and methodological advancement in studying policy narratives.