Moral Bias in Large Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

September 9, 2009 – 11:46 am
This is a review of Moral Bias in Large Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence (2009) by Timothy Feddersen, Sean Gailmard, and Alvaro Sandroni. American Political Science Review 103 (May): 175-192. You can find the original in Google Scholar.
Howard Dean with a confederate flag on his truck

Howard Dean and his truck (kidding, kidding)

In late 2003, Howard Dean lamented that southern white guys with confederate flags on their trucks ought to be voting for Democrats1; after all, it’s the Democrats who want to help the working classes. Folks like Dean think that these southern white guys are being duped by wealthy upper-crust Republicans, who trick the southerners into voting for them by tossing them just enough symbolic “red meat” (pro-life, anti-gay, anti-immigrant) to keep them under control.

I just read Feddersen et al’s article, in which the authors attempt to explain exactly why this “red meat” tactic works–that is, why southern evangelicals keep casting a “values vote” for Republicans instead of casting a materially rational vote for Democrats. Okay, in fairness, the authors don’t come out and say it that way, but it sure sounds like that’s what they’re trying to explain. As such, this study is loaded with potential controversy.

I’ll say that again. Feddersen and his colleagues didn’t say a word about Dean or confederate flags. What they authors really say in their analysis is something closer to this: Read More »

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Does Voting History Matter? Analysing Persistence in Turnout

March 4, 2009 – 11:52 am
This is a review of Does Voting History Matter? Analysing Persistence in Turnout (2009) by Kevin Denny and Orla Doyle. American Journal of Political Science 53 (January): 17-35. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

Yes, voting is habit-forming, but to a lesser extent than reported previously.

Denny and Doyle have a straightforward point in this article: Yes, voting is habit-forming, but to a lesser extent than reported previously. In a widely discussed article, Gerber, Green, and Shachar (2003) reported that voting in one election raises the probability of voting in subsequent elections by 47%.1 Denny and Doyle argue that the correct figure is closer to 13%. The difference, they claim, arises from methodological problems in the Gerber et al. article.

Given that this dispute revolves mostly around methodological (not theoretical) differences, one wonders why this article did not appear as a reply to Gerber et al, followed by a response from the original authors. As my critique at the end of this review will make clear, there are many holes that Gerber et al could poke in Denny and Doyle’s approach. Read More »

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Delegating Direct Democracy: Interparty Legislative Competition and the Adoption of the Initiative in the American States

February 18, 2009 – 11:52 am
This is a review of Delegating Direct Democracy: Interparty Legislative Competition and the Adoption of the Initiative in the American States (2008) by Daniel A. Smith and Dustin Fridkin. American Political Science Review 102 (August): 333-350. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

When a minority party gains tenuous control of the legislature, or when a majority feels that it might become the minority soon, then legislators gain an incentive to weaken the legislature by empowering the median voter.

Today, voters in 24 states can make policy directly through the initiative process. In most of these states, the initiative process was first adopted between 1898 and 1918. Smith and Fridkin seek to explain why only these states, and not others, adopted the initiative.

Previous Work

Because most of the states that adopted the initiative in this period were agrarian, western, and mostly white, historians have traditionally answered this question by claiming that the initiative was most likely to be adopted in “younger states with a strong history of populism and antimonopoly sentiments, more homogeneous [white] populations…, more radical (but weaker) political parties, and stronger interest groups” (pg 334). Smith and Fridkin contend that these conclusions have been based on deeply flawed logic and methods.1

In particular, scholars have erred in asking why some states adopted the initiative and others did not; such an approach focuses on voter demand for direct democracy. But since the initiative is usually adopted via legislative referendum, in which legislators invite voters to choose whether to adopt the initiative, scholars should instead be asking why legislators in some states chose to offer the initiative to voters, while legislators elsewhere did not.2

Theory and Findings

Smith and Fridkin argue that legislators were most likely to offer the initiative when states experienced close partisan competition. When a minority party gains tenuous control of the legislature, or when a majority feels that it might become the minority soon, then legislators gain an incentive to weaken the legislature by empowering the median voter. This is their main causal argument, which is supported by an event history analysis. Read More »

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Who is Mobilized to Vote? A Re-Analysis of 11 Field Experiments

February 11, 2009 – 11:55 am
This is a review of Who is Mobilized to Vote? A Re-Analysis of 11 Field Experiments (2009) by Kevin Arceneaux and David W. Nickerson. American Journal of Political Science 53 (January): 1-16. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

Efficient campaign managers should identify these fence-sitters and mobilize only them

Recent randomized experiments have shown that door-to-door mobilization efforts can have massive payoffs, boosting turnout by 7 to 10 percentage points among those targeted.1 But although previous studies have shown that mobilization has a large aggregate effect, they have not shown whether mobilization effects some types of voters more than others. Does door-to-door canvassing raise the probability of turnout equally for all voters, or are some types of voters more mobilized than others?

Briefly: The authors argue that mobilization has the strongest effects on voters who are indifferent about turning out. Efficient campaign managers should identify these fence-sitters and mobilize only them; money spent mobilizing those who are likely to turn out (or stay home) regardless of the campaign’s efforts is money wasted. Crucially, however, the authors demonstrate that these indifferent voters are not the same from one election to the next. In highly visible elections (like presidential elections), mobilization efforts should target those who rarely vote; in obscure elections (like legislative primaries), mobilization efforts should target those who regularly vote; and in mid-level elections (like Congressional or mayoral races), mobilization efforts should target those who vote occasionally. Read More »

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A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion

February 4, 2009 – 12:25 pm
This is a review of A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion (2008) by Craig Volden, Michael M. Ting, and Daniel P. Carpenter. American Political Science Review 102 (August): 319-332. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

Much of the empirical work to date has not adequately distinguished [game-theoretic] learning-based policy diffusion from [decision-theoretic] myopic individual adoptions.

Those who advocate federalism argue that devolution improves policy outcomes nationwide by providing opportunities for local experimentation. In the words of Louis Brandeis, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1932):

It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

These claims have inspired a literature on “diffusion,” mostly focused on the American states, that has asked whether there is evidence that the states do, in fact, learn from one another. For the most part, the existing literature has concluded that diffusion occurs regularly among the American states, although there is some disagreement as to the mechanism.1

By contrast, Volden, Ting, and Carpenter argue that none of the existing work (including their own previous work on diffusion, apparently) has provided any evidence of policy diffusion. The methods and assumptions used in previous research cannot differentiate between innovation (isolated experimentation by myopic states) and diffusion (learning from experiments in other states). Read More »

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Candidate Positioning and Voter Choice

January 28, 2009 – 11:53 am
This is a review of Candidate Positioning and Voter Choice (2008) by Michael Tomz and Robert P. Van Houweling. American Political Science Review 102 (August): 303-318. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

The lengthy previous literature on candidate positioning has failed to distinguish empirically between these three theories–something that Tomz and Van Houweling (claim to) do in this article.

Issue-based voting seems simple enough on its face: Support the candidate who will produce the policies you want. Simple as it sounds, though, there are three competing theories as to how voters actually make this decision. The lengthy previous literature on candidate positioning has failed to distinguish empirically between these three theories–something that Tomz and Van Houweling (claim to) do in this article.

Theories

Proximity theory is the best-known of these three theories. It makes a basic claim: If you line up all the candidates from most liberal to most conservative, voters will pick the candidate whose ideology is most similar to their own. This theory serves as a basic assumption of the median voter theorem and other spatial models. Read More »

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Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate

January 15, 2009 – 11:30 am
This is a review of Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate (2008) by Claude Berrebi and Esteban Klor. American Political Science Review 102 (August): 279-301. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

Terrorism within a particular locality exerts a strong effect, particularly if it occurs within three months of election day. In general, support for right-bloc parties tends to rise in localities that experience terror attacks.

Since 1984 Israeli has endured over 500 terrorist attacks, resulting in over 1000 fatalities. These attacks, together with the frequency of parliamentary elections, enables the authors to conduct a rigorous quantatitive analysis to answer a simple questions: Are voters sensitive to terrorism?1

At first blush, one might find the question simple: Of course voters are sensitive to terrorism. After all, the 2004 Madrid train bombings are widely credited with changing the outcome of Spain’s elections, to the point that the ever-reliable Wikipedia reports this as fact.2 But Berrebi and Klor go well beyond the elementary question of whether terrorism matters–they tell us exactly how it matters.

In brief: Terrorism within a particular locality exerts a strong effect, particularly if it occurs within three months of election day. In general, support for right-bloc parties tends to rise in localities that experience terror attacks.3 This shift towards the right happens regardless of who is currently in power. Read More »

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Does the Citizen Initiative Weaken Party Government in the U.S. States?

July 21, 2008 – 9:12 am
This is a review of Does the Citizen Initiative Weaken Party Government in the U.S. States? (2008) by Justin H. Phillips. State Politics and Policy Quarterly 8 (summer): 127-149. You can find the original in Google Scholar.

Democratic governments tax the most; Republicans tax the least; divided governments are in the middle. But here’s the rub: these relationships disappear in states with direct democracy.

When Progressive reformers first championed adoption of the citizen initiative and other direct democracy institutions, a major reason was to limit the ability of political parties to pursue extreme policies.

In the absence of direct democracy, political parties might not have much reason to promote moderate policies. Republican legislators would generally prefer policies to the right of the median, while Democratic legislators would prefer policies to the left. Whichever party has the legislative majority has a variety of tools at its disposal to help it push policy away from the median and towards its own ideal point. These tools include control of the legislative agenda, control of committee chairmanships, and so on. In addition, the need to appease major campaign donors and partisan activists increases the incentive to use these tools. As a result, it is not the legislative majority that governs; it is the majority of the majority party that governs. When legislative control shifts from Republicans to Democrats, you might see a large shift in policy outcomes–even if only a couple of legislative seats changed hands.

But this is exactly the sort of thing that the Progressive movement sought to end. A purpose of direct democracy was to force legislators to produce policy outcomes closer to what the median voter would want–regardless of which party has the legislative majority. Read More »

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