In the most recent issue of AJPS, Nie and his colleagues have an article that makes those two claims. The claims seem perfectly plausible. And they present well-executed research backing them up. Their findings are consistent with a string of previous work making the same argument and coming to the same conclusion (they list several such studies along the way). The main difference: Previous studies have operationalized “small-circulation outlets” as talk radio or cable television, but Nie et al look at internet news sites. They find that more ideologically extreme folks are more likely to visit online news sites.

At the risk of sounding ungenerous, my reaction was “well, duh.” I suppose it’s important to have precise measurement, so it’s worth looking specifically at who is viewing online news sites even though we would expect to find that the same people who consume other niche media would also consume online news. And I suppose that’s a purpose of journals–to look carefully at specific questions. I’m not criticizing them for writing the article by any means. In fact, a “well duh” reaction means they thought to test something that the rest of us assumed was true without bothering to check for sure. Good for them.

So, in sum: People who visit online news and political sites are more politically extreme. Well, duh.

For years, political scientists have explained this seeming paradox by pointing out that members of Congress can win reelection by running against Congress. A representative can urge his voters to send him back time after time so that he can keep working to fix the broken system. As Fenno wrote in Home Style, “It is easy for each Congressman to explain to his own supporters why he cannot be blamed for the performance of the collectivity . . . because the internal diversity and decentralization of the institution provide such a wide variety of collegial villains to flay before one’s supporters at home” (1978, 167).²

In his textbook on Congressional elections, Gary Jacobson sums up the dominant view among political scientists: “Members are not held individually responsible for their collective performance in governing.” (2004, 227).

David Jones has a recent article in AJPS that challenges this long held view. Jones looks back 60 years to a report commissioned in 1950 by the American Political Science Association Toward a More Responsive Two-Party System. That report urged “greater party cohesion in Congress,” suggesting that the presence of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats makes it more difficult for individual voters to hold their representative accountable for Congress’s collective activities.

Jones argues that the APSA report was correct: If the two parties become more distinct (i.e. polarized), then it should be easier for voters to blame members of the majority party for Congress’s collectively bad (or good) performance. And, as it happens, there’s been quite a bit of research in recent years showing that Congress has, in fact, become more polarized.

If Jones is right, then we’re in a new era. It may have been true 20, 30, or 40 years ago that members of Congress could evade accountability for Congress’s overall activities, but rising polarization has enabled voters to punish or reward Representatives for Congress’s collective performance.

Evidence that Overall Congressional Approval Matters

To test this possibility, Jones compiled each incumbent Representative’s electoral margin going back decades, producing thousands of data points. He then regressed those vote margins on a variety of independent variables. Among others, he regressed vote margins on Congress’s overall approval ratings. More importantly, he also interacted those approval ratings with measures of polarization (party unity).

Take a look at Figure 1 from Jones’s article (below). Along the X axis, Jones shows each year back through 1976. Along the Y axis, he shows that estimated effect of overall Congressional approval on individual incumbents’ vote margins for that year.³ By the end of the series, the estimated effect of overall approval rises above 0.50 (for members of the majority party). In other words, a one percentage point drop in Congressional approval (perhaps from 40 to 39) leads us to expect a 0.50+ drop in each incumbent’s vote margin. This is a powerful effect, subject to a powerful interaction.

Figure 1, Jones 2010

It’s worth noting that there is not similar interaction for members of the minority. Back in the days of low polarization, minority members could win reelection by running against Congress, just like members of the majority. Rising polarization has not prevented minority party members from continuing to run against Congress–and why should it? Minority party members can continue to win by running against Congress, citing all the majority’s misdeeds. Nothing has changed for the minority.

Comment and Criticism

This is an interesting and worthwhile article. It leaves me wondering, though, why 90+% of incumbents continue to win reelection. I began this review by pointing out a seeming paradox from 2008–not from 1976. Even in the most recent Congressional elections, 36% of voters said that most members did not deserve reelection, yet 94% of members won reelection. More generally, we continue to observe Congress (overall) receiving markedly low approval while individual members receive very high approval from their constituents.

If Jones is correct, then we ought not to observe this pattern so strongly anymore, yet we do. I’m not sure how to respond to Jones’s analysis given this continuing disconnect between overall and individual Congressional approval. Perhaps Jones has a serious problem in his statistical analysis that I’m not seeing resulting in an inflated estimate of the interaction. Or perhaps Congressional elections are sufficiently different from Congressional approval that this paradox can persist in approval data even as it evaporates in election results. I’m at a loss to resolve this puzzle.

This creates what we might call “the declining talent pool of soccer,” or more simply, the “benchwarmer” dilemma: You want your best 11 players on the field, but in order to motivate your players, you’ve got to threaten to replace them with an inferior player from the bench. Thus, one of these situations may result: Your 11 best players might give less than a full effort (knowing that their imperfect effort is still better than a benchwarmer’s full effort), or your inferior benchwarming players might be the ones you put on the field.

The same problem arises when choosing government officials. The result is inferior governance.

The “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in the British Cabinet

In recently published research, Torun Dewan and David Myatt argue that the same dynamic limits the performance of governments. They’ve got the British cabinet in mind. With salaries and benefits defined by statute, the British Prime Minister’s only “stick” to motivate junior ministers is the threat of removal. But since ministers generally come from a small pool (the House of Commons), the PM can’t actually remove a minister unless the PM is willing to substitute in a less desirable alternate.

Thus, the longer a party controls the British cabinet, the less talented it will be at governing. Either the ministers remain in their positions for so long that the threat of removal loses its credibility, or else talented ministers are replaced with inferior ministers so often that the overall talent level crumbles. Eventually, the cabinet becomes so ineffective that that majority loses control of parliament, allowing the other party to start the same process all over again with its (initially) fresh talent pool.

Is There a “Benchwarmer” Dilemma in U.S. Elections?

I like Dewan and Myatt’s argument. It makes a lot of sense. It helps explain why there is often a “honeymoon” period after elections when the new government seems so effective.¹ In large measure, their argument works so well because it focuses on the British cabinet, where roughly 90 cabinet members (ministers and junior ministers) need to be drawn from a pool of 350 or so majority-party members of parliament. After all, the soccer analogy that I use above might not work so well if there were 1000 players on the roster and only 11 on the field.

Or would it? I think that the “benchwarmer” problem from the soccer analogy can apply just as well to American elections. Consider a member of the U.S. House running for reelection in his district. The only punishment that his “boss” (his voters) can threaten him with is removal from office, whether in the primary or in the general election. They have observed the incumbent over the past two years–longer if he has served several terms–and they understand his strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, they may be mostly unfamiliar with the challenger, who may be a political newcomer.

Thus, voters are faced with a dilemma: Should they keep the star player (the incumbent) on the field despite imperfect performance, or should they substitute in a less experienced, less tested benchwarmer? Elections aren’t merely a referendum on the incumbent’s performance.² Instead, it’s an evaluation of the incumbent that takes account of uncertainty about the challenger’s ability to fill the incumbent’s shoes.

The effect of all this might be that incumbents know they can safely underperform without having to worry much about losing their seats. Maybe that’s why over 90% of U.S. House members get reelected every two years.³ Despite all the recent hubbub about 2010 being an anti-incumbent election year, I’ll be stunned (like Sides and Yglesias) if that pattern changes much this year. Voters find it better to stick with the devil you know than with the benchwarmer you don’t.

Together, these two articles are a must-read. They help explain why genes and other biological factors might influence our political leanings. Biological factors (especially genetics) are the dominant cause of these Big Five personality traits, which then remain stable throughout life. In turn, these Big Five traits influence our political leanings (Gerber et al.) and our political activity (Mondak et al.).

The Big Five personality traits

Both articles adopt the “Big Five” approach that, they claim, has become widely accepted among psychologists. Quoting two psychologists, Gerber et al. sum up these big five traits as follows:

The Big Five - Gerber et al., pg 113

As Mondak et al. note, these Big Five traits are often summed up as OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (where neurotic is the opposite of emotionally stable).

Effects of personality on ideology

Gerber et al. argue that these Big Five personality traits influence our political leanings. Each trait may have different effects on our economic ideology (free market vs interventionist) as well as on our social ideology (pro-choice/pro-equality vs pro-life/pro-tradition). They expect four of the five traits to influence ideology. The only exception is extroversion, which they expect to influence political participation (as Mondak et al. show) but not ideology. Their predictions:

Using a very large sample drawn from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), the authors confirm most of these predictions. I’ve pasted below their Figure 1. All hypotheses are confirmed. Their only error was in predicting that emotional stability would cause folks to lean left on social issues. As it turns out, emotionally stable folks lean right on both dimensions and neurotic folks lean left on both dimensions. So we learn that Conservatives are hard-working, organized, closed-minded, and emotionally stable. Liberals are lazy, disorganized, open-minded, and neurotic. Let’s see how the punditocracy spins that one. The effects of personality rival the effects of education and income.

Figure 1 from Gerber et al. 2010

Contextual effects

Gerber et al. also argue that these effects can be contextual, although they seem less committed to this possibility than Mondak et al, for whom environmental interactions were a critical part of the story. In particular, they argue that race might matter. For example, blacks tend to view poverty as caused by systematic forces rather than by laziness; as such, conscientiousness may have a weaker pull among blacks toward economic liberalism. Likewise, blacks tend to be surrounded by liberalism; thus, “openness” might actually lead blacks to question the liberalism that surrounds them rather than pulling them toward the left. Gerber et al. find support for these contextual interactions with a series of figures like the one below. When I look at these figures, though, it doesn’t look so much like an interaction to me–rather, it looks like it’s just harder to predict ideology using personality among blacks than it is among whites.

Figure 2a from Gerber et al 2010

Comment and Criticism

This article, together with the similar one by Mondak et al., is a must-read. I’m not sure whether I’m persuaded yet that I need to demand a personality index on every poll I work with. But these two articles introduce us to a new psychological approach that I’m sure we’ll see much more of.

A few years ago,  Alford, Funk, and Hibbing challenged that environmental approach by showing that political orientations are genetically transmitted. Later work by Fowler and his colleagues has confirmed that our political leanings are genetically influenced. But although this genetic research has drawn our attention toward biological influences, it has not produced a theory that can explain why biology matters.

The goal of Mondak et al.’s recent APSR article is to develop a theory that can link these genetic studies with the more widespread environmental studies. The figure below (from the article) summarizes the theory. Note that they expect neither environmental factors nor personality traits to have much of a direct effect on political behavior. Instead, most of the effect is interactive. For example, if a person has an extroverted personality type, and if a form of political participation is social (e.g. a caucus as opposed to donating to a candidate via internet), then you will expect that person to participate. Here’s the figure:

Figure 1 from Mondak et al 2010

By “personality,” the authors refer to the “Big Five” personality index widely used within psychological circles. The Big Five traits include these:

• Openness to new experience. Folks who seek new experiences and information as opposed to folks content with their lot.
• Conscientiousness. Organized, hard-working folks as opposed to lazy or sloppy people.
• Extroversion vs introversion.
• Agreeableness. Warm, kind, sympathetic, generous people as opposed to unkind, distant, cold, miserly people.
• Emotional stability vs neuroticism. Calm, relaxed, stable as opposed to tense, nervous.

The authors stress a single main point: We cannot understand the effects of personality without accounting for the environment, and we cannot understand the effects of the environment without accounting for personality. They illustrate this argument by showing that certain types of political participation can be predicted well by interacting personality traits with environmental variables, but the empirical analysis seems peripheral here. As I understand it, the main goal of this paper is just to get political scientists thinking about the importance of personality.

They expect this personality research to supplant genetic research. The genetic research has shown an interesting relationship between biological factors and political behavior but without providing any sort of theoretical mechanism. By contrast, psychologists have shown that genes and other biological factors “account for most of the variance in personality traits” (p 89), but personality traits are the proximate cause of later behaviors.

Comments and Criticism

These are novel arguments, and I look forward to seeing how they influence future behavioral research. At the same time, I find myself wondering how much there is to gain by looking at personality. The authors have argued that personality can influence political behaviors (turnout and other political participation). But the genetic literature has shown that genetics influence political dispositions (liberal vs conservative, Republican vs Democratic). If Mondak et al. really want to show that personality is the real (proximate) cause of anything “caused” by genetics, then they need to show that personality influences political dispositions as well.

Update: See my review of a study that does just that–Gerber et al.’s “Personality and Political Attitudes.”

But what hasn’t been clear until know is whether education caused voting, or whether it was merely correlated with voting. After all, education is caused by family background (parents’ education level, family wealth) and personal characteristics (intelligence). Does education cause voting, or do the things that cause education also cause voting? A major knock against the “education as cause” theory came when Brody (1978) pointed out that education levels have risen dramatically since the 1960s, but turnout has not.

So how can we figure out whether education causes turnout? Well, shoot, what if we did an experiment that randomly caused one group of kids to get more education than a control group of their peers? Then we could just see whether those who were randomly induced to get more education also ended up voting at higher rates.

Genius. In the current issue of AJPS, Sondheimer and Green have an article that does exactly that.

Experiments and Results

Sondheimer and Green dig up three old studies from the education literature. All three studies used randomized experiments to see whether certain treatments would increase high school graduation rates.

• The Perry Preschool Experiment took a randomly selected group of disadvantaged kids and gave them an intensive preschool experience in the 1960s. The treatment group’s graduation rate was 46% higher than the control group’s. And its turnout rate in 2000/2002 was 44% higher than the control group’s.
• The “I Have a Dream” Foundation of Boulder, Colorado, identified a bunch of fifth-graders in 1992 and offered them tutoring, extracurricular activities, mentoring, and other assistance from the time of their selection through high school. Once again, a treatment group participated while a control group did not. The treatment group’s graduation rate was 28% higher than the control’s; the treatment group’s turnout rate through 2004 was 26% higher than the control’s.
• The Tennessee STAR experiment randomly assigned kids entering kindergarten in 1985 to have regular class sizes (22-25 students) or small class sizes (13-17 students) from kindergarten through third grade. Those in the treatment group graduated at a rate 6% higher than the control; they voted at rates 10-11% higher than the control.

You can look up Sondheimer and Green’s article to see the advanced statistical analysis, but the percentages above tell the whole story.¹

What we Learn

Education does, indeed, have a robust causal effect on voter turnout. This finding is all the more striking because the authors did not expect it. Both authors had previously argued that education’s correlation with turnout was probably spurious. But after conducting this analysis, they change their minds. As they put it, “The data presented here have led to a reversal of this assessment.”

So we know that education causes turnout. It’s not just correlated. We still don’t know why. Maybe education gives kids the skills they need to figure out how to vote. Maybe it promotes interest in politics. Maybe it expands kids’ social networks. Maybe it increases their confidence, or “efficacy.” Maybe it increases their later affluence, hence their political interests. We still don’t know. All we know is that education does have a genuine, strong, and robust causal effect on turnout.

Masket takes this a step further, arguing that local informal party organizations control nominations and through those nominations exert control over the legislative behavior of politicians.  He argues that “parties control the public behavior of their office holders by acting as gatekeepers to political office.”  While agreeing with Aldrich (1995), that parties help organizing the legislature, Masket argues that parties, and in conjunction party nominations, are primarily a mechanism by which concerned citizens hold legislators accountable for their actions.

Testing and Results

To test these arguments, Masket uses roll-call analysis of the California Assembly prior and subsequent to the 1953 decision to mandate party labels on primary ballots, effectively eliminating the ability of legislators to cross-file in both political primaries.  His analysis of roll call votes as well as votes for the Speaker of the Assembly shows that the imposition of these new regulations on primary elections had a marked effect of increasing a the partisan nature of the legislature, as politics became less bipartisan after the change, which Masket argues was not the desire of those within the legislature.

Inside the Smoke-Filled Rooms and Thoughts on the How

In addition to his quantitative analysis of legislator behavior, Masket also details the structure of 5 different local party organizations: Orange County Republicans, South Los Angeles Democrats, East Side LA County Democrats, West LA Democrats, and the local party organizations of Fresno County.  Through interviews, Masket details the ways in which party organizations exercise their influence using things such as donor networks, sample ballot mailings, and the mobilization of activist networks.

Unfortunately, none of these items that come out through interviews are easily testable, and while Masket presents ample evidence of local influence on the nomination process, it is difficult to determine how much influence these organizations have on the outcome of nominations.

Small Qualms

While Masket’s work shows clearly the change in the influence of parties after the change in primary election law, he doesn’t give any solid quantitative evidence as to how exactly those mechanisms work.  Is it the fundraising network?  Is it the power of mobilization?   While the interviewees claimed to have influence in all of these aspects, the heads of a campaign or a campaign organization has an incentive to make their role as significant as possible in order to increase their status as the gatekeeper.  Masket clearly demonstrates to the reader that local party organizations influence nominations, but falls a little short on convincing the reader as to the mechanism through which these organizations control nominations.

The question: How do candidates decide what to emphasize in their campaign communications? When do they go negative? When do they stick to the issues? When do they emphasize their experience and community ties? And given how many thousands of campaigns are run around this country each election cycle, how can we possible study all this?

There has been some previous work on this question, but most of it has looked at television ads or media coverage. Both sources have flaws. Television ads and media coverage are more common in the most competitive races, since safe incumbents don’t spend money on ads. They are also more common in Senate races than House races. How, then, can we use television ads to see how rhetoric is different in competitive races or in House races than in other races?

In a recent article, Druckman et al. avoid these problems by looking instead at rhetoric in Congressional campaign websites in 2002, 2004, and 2006. Although not all candidates had websites in 2002, by 2004 and 2006 just about every major-party Congressional candidate had a website. And what do we learn?

Findings

• Challengers are far more likely than incumbents to use negative attacks (whether personal attacks or issue contrasts) than incumbents.
• Challengers are more likely than incumbents to use “Web 2.0″ technologies that enable visitors to create content (e.g. via commenting on the site).
• Challengers are more likely than incumbents to stress their party affiliation and to bring up issues that their party “owns,” particularly if the incumbent is not a member of the district’s majority party.²
• Incumbents are more likely than challengers to emphasize their experience, their long history in the district, and the specific benefits (pork) they have provided to the district. This is especially true in hotly contested districts; elsewhere, incumbents are unlikely to put much effort at all into their websites.

Theory

Druckman and his colleagues tell a compelling story to explain these findings. Briefly, and with considerable re-interpretation by me:

• Going negative and enabling interactive Web 2.0 technologies are risky. Since incumbents enjoy significant electoral advantages³, they feel no need to take on these risks. But challengers seeking to overcome these advantages may find these risks worth taking. Thus, challengers are more likely to pepper their sites with negative comments and also to provide forums, wikis, or commenting interfaces.
• Partisanship is often as valuable a cue to voters as incumbency. Thus, challengers make a partisan case against incumbents who belong to the district’s minority party.
• Incumbents want to do what they can to strengthen their incumbency advantage. Thus, an emphasis on talking about things that only incumbents have (experience, credit claiming opportunities, etc).

Importance

The authors’ biggest contribution is their thorough, thoughtful, and insightful use of campaign websites. This data source allows for a near-universal (especially after 2002), unfiltered look at what candidates want voters to hear. And this method does, indeed, yield different results than we would find if the authors had relied on more traditional data sources, such as TV ads or media coverage. When the authors restrict their analysis to those races that had significant ad buys or media coverage, many of their important results disappear into statistical oblivion. The authors have identified a cheap, easy way to capture a fuller sample of current campaign messages.

Quibbles and parting jabs

I like this article, but the authors need to be careful not to oversell their contribution.⁴ Reliance on websites as a true measure of what messages campaigns are actually pushing may not be as much a panacea as claimed.

First: Who reads campaign websites? The authors use a survey of campaign web developers to show who, in the developers’ minds, reads the websites. Even the developers concede that the main target audience–swing voters–is the least likely of all to actually visit the site. But remember that the web developers probably dramatically overestimate the importance of their product. How else would they sell their services? Consider the websites of two prominent members of Congress: Eric Cantor (Republican Whip) and Jim Clyburn (Democratic Whip).⁵ Alexa.com is a free service that tracks how many people view websites.⁶ Alexa reports that so few people visit Cantor’s (report) and Clyburn’s (report) sites that it can’t even provide an estimate of their reach.⁷ So, I ask: Do we have evidence that anybody actually reads these websites?

Druckman et al. would probably counter that it doesn’t matter whether anybody visits the site. What matters is that the site summarizes the campaign messages being used by the candidate generally, both online, in ads, and in appearances. Well…

Second: Do candidates actually push the same messages in the real world as in their websites? You can fit many, many campaign messages into a website. You can only fit a small handful into a single ad, appearance, or mailer. Perhaps candidates intentionally place their most provocative messages on their websites to avoid having to say them to their opponent’s face during a debate. We saw this in the 2008 presidential race. Both presidential campaigns released their worst ads online only, knowing that the media would see them and relay the attack’s message to conflict-hungry viewers. This was a hands-off way for candidates to get negative messages out into the blogosphere without having to push the messages personally. If that happens in Congressional races too, then this study is flawed–perhaps deeply.

But again. I like the article. It makes a fabulous contribution. The authors do as most of us do, however, by overselling their point.

This problem is not unique to the states. Some countries have adopted a quota system to combat such underrepresentation. Obviously, if you reserve a quarter of Congressional seats for women, then you’ll end up with more women in Congress. But the question is, do these quotas actually help change the status of women in politics? What if we imposed a quota for a while and then withdrew it–would women see an enduring improvement?

Turns out we would.

The Indian Experiment

I finally got around to reading Bhavnani’s article, published last February, in which he exploits some fascinating data to show that even if you impose a quota for only one election, in the following (quota-free) election, women will still have much better odds of winning after the quotas are removed than they did before the quotas were put in place.

India uses a quota system to ensure representation of women in local offices. Prior to each election, 33% of local seats will be reserved for women; only women may run in these races. These reservations are made through a genuinely random lottery system.¹ So a seat might be reserved for women in one election but then open to anybody in the following election.

These rules create an honest-to-goodness natural experiment. Bhavnani looks at unreserved seats in the 2002 Mumbai elections. He compares those that were reserved in 1997 (the treatment group) to those that were not (the control). He’s not comparing reserved seats to unreserved seats; he’s comparing unreserved seats that were previously reserved to unreserved seats that were not previously reserved. This technique enables him to estimate the long-term effect of quotas after they are withdrawn.

Even after quotas are removed, women are five times more likely to win in post-quota seats than in other seats. Chew on that. Five times more likely.

Here’s some more comparisons between the treatment and control groups. In the control, only 3.7% of winners are female; in the treatment, 21.6% are. In the control, only 35.8% of wards had a female candidate bother to run; in the treatment, 73% did. In the control, only 4.4% of candidates were female; in the treatment, 11.9% were.

There are several reasons that (withdrawn) quotas could have these enduring effects. Bhavnani points to two as most likely. First: Women realize that they can win elections, so they keep running. Not just incumbents, though; you also get more rookie women choosing to run in the treatment than in the control. Something about seeing successful women makes other women realize that they can run. Second: Parties realize that women can win, so they start nominating women to represent them in the election.

Thoughts

Hillary's problem in 2000?

I have no methodological or theoretical critiques of this paper. That’s unusual, if you read my other posts. However, I do have lingering questions that I hope future research addresses.

Bhavnani shows that quotas continue to help women in the first election (only) after they are withdrawn. How long does it take (if ever) for these effects to disappear? Unfortunately, it appears that Bhavnani could not find data to test that. I’d love to see it though. A short term effect is interesting, but not the end of the story.

These quotas apply only to local elections. I’d be curious to look at all the women in state/national office and see how many got their start under (or immediately after) a quota. Does getting your start under a quota make you look like a weaker candidate when you run for office later? Recall that many thought Hillary Clinton had an unfair advantage winning her first Senate election, so she had to work very hard to prove herself as something more than Bill’s shadow. Do women who start out under a quota have a similar problem?

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:

Some key terms

First, people have instrumental preferences. That is, they recognize that option A will make them materially better off than option B. (Analogy: Working-class southern whites recognize that they would be materially better off with Democrats in power.) These instrumental preferences lead them to prefer option A over option B. Folks know that their personal situation (employment, finances, health care, whatever) will improve under option A.

But second, people also have moral preferences. That is, they recognize option B as the more moral choice than option A.

But here’s a key point: These moral preferences are just “expressive” preferences, not “instrumental” preferences. What’s that mean? People recognize that their personal situation won’t change at all depending on whether option B wins or not; they know that they won’t be visiting an abortion clinic regardless of whether abortion is legal. Thus, these moral choices aren’t “instrumental” choices, since nothing in their life changes either way. So they just want to vote for option B to “express” themselves as being a moral person.²

The point

So, the research question for Feddersen et al is this: Why do people choose to cast an “expressive” (moral) vote for option B rather than an “instrumental” (material, rational) vote for option A? Or, as Dean would put it, why do those southern whites keep voting Republican (a “values vote”) instead of for Democrats (for better health care, Social Security, etc)? Briefly:

As the number of voters grows, an individual voter’s probability of being decisive falls. If there are 11 voters, each voter has a 1/11 “pivot probability”; if there are 101 voters, each one has a 1/101 “pivot probability.” In most American elections, the pivot probability is so tiny that it’s effectively zero.

When voters consider the benefit of casting an instrumental vote (that is, voting for A), they weight the material payoff of doing so against this pivot probability. That is, if I think that I’ll be materially better of with A than with B, but I also know that I’m only one of 100,000,000 voters, then I recognize that my individual vote has little bearing on whether I wind up with A or B in the end. Thus, when the electorate is large, voters don’t find instrumental preferences compelling.

However, the “expressive” payoff of choosing the moral option (option B) does not get reduced by my pivot probability. Regardless of whether A or B wins, I can feel better about myself if I know that I cast the ethically/morally appropriate vote.

Thus, when the electorate is larger than a handful of people (and it always is), we should expect moral preferences to trump instrumental preferences.

The point again, stated differently

When voting for A or B, you get two kinds of “reward” for doing so. The “instrumental” rewards are the outcome-contingent rewards; you only get these rewards if the right candidate wins. The “expressive” rewards are entirely intrinsic; your conscience will feel better if you know you made the ethically “right” choice. Because each individual voter has almost zero influence over the outcome of an election, voters don’t pay much attention to outcome-contingent rewards. But because the “expressive” rewards are not outcome-contingent, voters will pay attention to these sorts of rewards.

Thus, when a voter’s material preferences and moral preferences point to opposite candidates (e.g. Dean or Bush in 2004), expect the moral preferences to dominate.

The authors test this theory with some interesting laboratory experiments. They find that (contrived) instrumental rewards have less and less influence on subject’s “votes” relative to (contrive) expressive rewards as the pivot probability falls from 1 to 1/11. From this, they infer that expressive rewards would dominate in a real election, where pivot probabilities are often smaller than 1/1,000,000.

Some parting thoughts

This is an interesting bit of research. Although the authors never mention Dean, evangelicals, or any other particular group, it’s clear what they’re really trying to explain. They want to explain why southern evangelicals keep voting Republican, despite their better interest (according to Dean). Once the authors’ sterile, academic language is replaced with these specific references to Dean and southern evangelicals, some flaws with the theory become clear, though.

The biggest flaw: Why do we assume that moral preferences are merely expressive and not also instrumental? Sincere believers may well think that divine providence will send greater prosperity, peace, and blessings to the United States if only Americans work to be a moral people. This is a constant theme in the Old Testament; when God’s people follow his will, they prosper.

I’m neither southern nor evangelical, but it’s apparent that the authors of this study, like Dean, do not take evangelicals’ faith seriously. If they did, they would acknowledge that “values votes” may well seem instrumental to the people casting them. And if these moral choices are instrumental, not merely expressive, then the entire theory collapses inward.

Where would that leave us? Perhaps southern white evangelicals preferred Bush over Dean (and Kerry) in 2004 because they actually thought that Bush’s sincere religious faith would be instrumentally good for them and their country.