Implicit Race Attitudes Predicted Vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

In the week before the 2008 United States presidential election, 1,057 registered voters reported their choice between the principal contenders (John McCain and Barack Obama) and completed several measures that might predict their candidate preference, including two implicit and two self-report measures of racial preference for European Americans (Whites) relative to African Americans (Blacks) and measures of symbolic racism and political conservatism. Greater White preference on each of the four race attitude measures predicted intention to vote for McCain, the White candidate. The implicit race attitude measures (Implicit Association Test and Affect Misattribution Procedure) predicted vote choice independently of the self-report race attitude measures, and also independently of political conservatism and symbolic racism. These findings support construct validity of the implicit measures.     

The art of impression management: self-presentation in local-level campaign literature

Campaign literature is a ubiquitous feature on the American electoral landscape. Candidates distribute written materials for the sole purpose of persuading voters to vote for them instead of for another candidate. The information a candidate includes in a piece of campaign literature, as well as how it is presented, can reveal his or her perception of the criteria citizens use when deciding for whom to vote. The findings from an examination of 288 pieces of campaign literature distributed by candidates for city council seats in 11 Ohio counties in November 1997, suggest that they perceive potential voters as being susceptible to both intellectual and emotional campaign messages.     

Moral Values, Moralism, and the 2004 Presidential Election

The "moral values vote" in the 2004 American presidential election should be interpreted more broadly than as a reflection of concerns about same-sex marriage and abortion. Instead of specific hot-button social policy issues, a general personality trait of moralism—the tendency to perceive a moral dimension in everyday decisions—may have contributed to the election outcome. Specifically, we hypothesize that some Bush supporters shared Bush's high level of moralism (as reflected in his rhetoric) and that this moralism motivated their votes. Consistent with our hypothesis, a preliminary empirical investigation suggests that Bush voters were, indeed, higher in moralism than were Kerry voters. Plans for further research and political strategy implications are discussed.     

Celebrity and politics: Effects of endorser credibility and sex on voter attitudes,perceptions, and behaviors

While much research examines the effects of celebrity endorsements in commercial advertising, scholars have only recently sought to investigate the effects of celebrity endorsements of politicians on voter perceptions and behavior. This study expands existing research on celebrity political endorsement effects via an experiment exploring effects of different versions of a news story describing a celebrity's endorsement of a political candidate on participants’ voting attitudes, perceptions of candidate credibility, and voting behavioral intent. Although participants perceive credibility differences between high- and low-credibility celebrities, neither endorser credibility nor endorser sex impact attitudes toward the endorsed candidate, perceptions of the candidate's credibility, or intended voting behavior. Conceptual relationships to other studies on celebrity endorsement effects are discussed, as are implications, limitations, and directions for future research.     

Strategic voting in the 1984 democratic presidential primaries

When casting their ballots in primary elections, voters usually vote in a straight-forward manner for the candidate of their preference. But sometimes sophisticated voters vote for a second or third choice who has a better chance of winning in the general election or even cross over to the opposition party to vote for a candidate who will be easier to defeat in the general election. This article assesses the amount and importance of such strategic voting in Democratic presidential primaries in 1984 using discriminate analysis.     

Gerrymandering on Georgia's Mind: The Effects of Redistricting on Vote Choice in the 2006 Midterm Election*

Objective. We make use of individual‐level survey data from the 2006 midterm election in order to determine the degree to which redistricting affected the vote choice of whites residing in Georgia Congressional Districts 8 and 12. Methods. A multivariate probit model was used to assess the probability of voting for the GOP House candidate among voters represented by the same incumbent before and after redistricting versus voters who had been newly drawn into one of these districts. Results. Despite a national tide that favored the Democratic Party in the 2006 elections, redrawn whites were more likely to vote for the Republican challengers in the districts surveyed. Conclusions. Our findings indicate that redistricting can be used to dampen the incumbency advantage. In addition, the findings of this research also speak to the continuing Republican realignment of white voters in the Deep South and to the recognition that the effects of redistricting are dependent on political context.     

State political culture and support for Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries

Though ideologically similar, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appealed to different types of voters in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and demographically the candidates’ support varied considerably. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, we find that state political culture played an outsized role in determining which candidate emerged victorious in a particular state. When the size of demographic groups in the 2008 Democratic primaries are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state political characteristics and Daniel Elazar's state political culture typology, political culture proves to be an important determinant of the level of support given to Obama in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are more likely to have given Obama a greater share of the primary vote and states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were less likely to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.     

Are Ballot Order Effects Heterogeneous?*

Objective. Past research on ballot order effects has typically focused on the average benefit a candidate receives if placed at the top of the ballot. This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining the possibility that a simple average may mask systematic differences in how the ballot order effect varies across candidates and voters. Methods. Using data from all Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004, a sample that covers 1,187 separate electoral contests and 7,113 candidate × election observations, this study estimates the effect of ballot order on a candidate's share of the primary vote. To determine whether ballot order effects differ across voters as well as candidates, the study also makes use of electorate‐level demographic data from the 1996 and 2001 Australian censuses. Results. The results of these estimations indicate that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate's vote share by about 1 percentage point. As a proportion of their total vote, this effect is much larger for independents and minor parties than for major parties. The ballot order effect appears to be similar for male and female candidates, and does not show strong trends upward or downward over the 20‐year period covered by our study. Across electorates, the ballot order effect is higher in places where voters are younger and fluency in English is lower. Conclusions. A statistically significant ballot order effect was a consistent feature of Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004. Moreover, this study challenges the assumption that ballot order effects are homogenous, and finds that the effect of being placed atop the ballot varies across both candidates and voters.     

Sincerity and manipulation under approval voting

Under approval voting, each voter can nominate as many candidates as she wishes and the election winners are those candidates that are nominated most often. A voter is said to have voted sincerely if she prefers all those candidates she nominated to all other candidates. As there can be a set of winning candidates rather than just a single winner, a voter’s incentives to vote sincerely will depend on what assumptions we are willing to make regarding the principles by which voters extend their preferences over individual candidates to preferences over sets of candidates. We formulate two such principles, replacement and deletion, and we show that, under approval voting, a voter who accepts those two principles and who knows how the other voters will vote will never have an incentive to vote insincerely. We then discuss the consequences of this result for a number of standard principles of preference extension in view of sincere voting under approval voting.     

Missing ingredients in political advertising: The right formula for political sophistication and candidate credibility

An increase in usage of political advertising has become a global phenomenon. Previous research on political advertising has found both intended and backlash effects, indicating that the advertising effects are likely to be moderated by message and audience factors. In this study, advertising tones (i.e., positive or negative advertising) are examined. The experimental research also examines two contingent variables—the level of voters’ political sophistication and the degree of candidate credibility. The results indicate that a voter's political sophistication may result in bidirectional effects on the impact of advertising tone. Candidate credibility determines the direction of these effects. When voters face a candidate with high credibility, the influences of negative advertising and comparative advertising decrease but the effects of positive advertising are accentuated as a voter's political sophistication increases. The outcomes are reversed when voters face a candidate with low credibility. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of advertising tactics in election campaigns.     

Bribing voters without verification

This article distinguishes between two types of vote buying mechanisms. If vote choices can be monitored, vote buyers will not discriminate amongst prospective voters, regardless of how they are expected to vote. If voting is secret, a vote buyer will pay opposition voters not to vote which forces the opposition to pay its own voters to ensure they do vote. This implies the secret ballot may be less effective in curbing bribery than originally thought.     

Location of Public Goods and the Calculus of Voting: The Seattle Monorail Referendum*

Objectives. In this article we explore how the geographic location of a proposed public good on the ballot in a local referendum influences voting turnout. We argue that voters who live farther away from the good, and are thus likely to bear the cost of the good but have no access to it, would be more motivated to turn out in the election. Drawing on the cost‐orientation hypothesis, or negativity effect, “that people are more strongly motivated to avoid losses than to approach gains,” we expect these voters to derive higher expressive benefits from the act of voting relative to those of voters located closer to the good. Methods. We examine voting turnout in the 2002 referendum in the City of Seattle on the proposed construction of a monorail. We conduct our study at the precinct level using spatial tools of analysis. We evaluate the effect of accessibility on turnout by means of a curvilinear model that incorporates demographic and political variables. Results. We find that voting turnout is determined partly by accessibility. Turnout is higher in precincts located farther away from the monorail line than in precincts located relatively closer to the line. Partisanship conditions this effect. Conclusions. This study provides tentative support for linking voter turnout to the negativity effect via expressive benefits. Voters' location in relation to a public good may affect directly their political behavior by means of their perceived net gains or losses from the good.     

The geography of deprivation in New Zealand by electorate

ABSTRACT

In the run-up to the 2017 General Election, the economy, housing, health, education, inequality and justice were important policy issues. General Elections are a time when voters exercise their democratic right to vote for their preferred party and parliamentary candidate to represent themselves, their whānau and community. In many cases, political parties’ policies seek to improve the wellbeing of people who are living in more deprived communities, but people in deprived communities are typically less likely to vote. The recently released New Zealand Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) enables users to explore deprivation in electorates across the country. This paper compares the distribution of deprivation and voter turnout across a selection of General Electoral Districts (GEDs) and demonstrates that while overall patterns of deprivation may be similar between GEDs, the drivers of these patterns can differ immensely.     

Bandwagon Effects and Two-Party Majority Voting

Empirical studies of voting behavior provide evidence of bandwagon effects. Some voters, believing that a particular candidate will win, vote for this candidate even though they prefer the alternative. This paper provides a non-expected utility explanation of such behavior by positing that voters may be averse to the uncertainty associated with an election.     

Three's a crowd? The Nader vote in the 2000 presidential, election in U.S. metropolitan areas

The 2000 U.S. presidential election resulted in one of the closest and most controversial outcomes in U.S. history. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader had little chance of winning, but nevertheless impacted the race in several close states and arguably swung the race from Al Gore to George W. Bush. This research examines Ralph Nader's “urban strategy” to win 5% of the vote for president and the bases of his electoral support. This study uses the METRO_2000 data set which contains a variety of publicly available variables for 276 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the year 2000. The analysis uses OLS regression to examine the determinants of the percentage of the vote for Nader in each MSA. The results indicate that the Nader vote was positively influenced by key electoral variables such as the level of electoral participation, whether Nader was on the ballot or could be written in, and the closeness of the race in state polls leading up to the election. The Nader vote was also higher in MSAs with high percentages of voters who supported Nader programs including environmentalists, those favoring universal health care and gay rights, union members, and MSAs that were college towns or with high percentages of college-educated voters. Ralph Nader's urban strategy effectively mobilized enough of his electoral base to impact the 2000 election, but electoral constraints and the closeness of the race prevented him from achieving his goal of attaining 5% of the vote. This case holds lessons about the limits and possibilities of third party campaigns in U.S. presidential elections.     

Everyday Racism as Predictor of Political Racism in Flemish Belgium

Two aspects of research on racism in Flanders (Belgium) are discussed in this article based on results from large-scale surveys between 1991 and 2003. The first relates to the (negative) attitudes of the majority toward foreigners (everyday racism) . The second relates to the vote for an extreme right-wing political party that emphasizes anti-immigrant viewpoints in its political program and propaganda (political racism) . Our main research question is how both forms of racism are related. First, theories to explain political racism are reviewed. Some theories suggest an extreme right-wing vote to be motivated by a content-related agreement with (part of) the program of these parties (e.g., racism, nationalism, or authoritarianism). Other theories suggest that this vote represents an antipolitical protest vote. From these theories, hypotheses are derived regarding the background characteristics and attitudes that are associated with an extreme right-wing vote (e.g., the Vlaams Blok). These hypotheses are tested using data from election research in 1991, 1999, and 2003. The results suggest that the vote for the party Vlaams Blok is a rational vote. Of all theories, the theory suggesting that everyday racism plays a prominent role received most support. Everyday racism thus motivates political racism in the Flemish part of Belgium.     

Political information,gender and the vote: the differential impact of organizations,personal discussion,and the media on the electoral decisions of women and men

Although there are many demonstrated ways in which men and women approach politics differently, we know very little about how sources of political information, e.g., mass media, political organizations, differentially influence the vote choices of men and women. Using a rich, contextual dataset containing measures not only of respondent perceptions of political information, but actual content coding of those sources of political information, we estimate how television, newspapers, personal discussants, organizations, and political parties may have impacted the voting of men and women in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. We find that women’s vote choices are more likely than men’s to be influenced by the organizations to which they belong. Women are also more likely to respond to television news with a hostile media bias—they see television newscasts as definitively favoring the candidate that they oppose. We address possible explanations for these patterns of results and point towards directions for additional research.     

The electoral consequences of alienation: Nonvoting and protest voting in the 1992 presidential race

This article focuses on the context of the 1992 national elections in order to determine why certain alienated individuals chose to stay home on election day while others responded by voting for a third party Presidential candidate. Two dimensions of alienation, internal and external political inefficacy, are linked to lower levels of voting, as is consistent with previous research on voting behavior. In addition, we find that, among those who voted, those individuals who expressed political cynicism or external inefficacy were more likely to vote for Ross Perot. We conclude that, while many alienated individuals do not vote, the Perot candidacy in 1992 led certain alienated individuals to engage in “protest” voting by casting their vote for an unlikely winner in the presidential race.     

Inequality and Political Consensus

This paper develops a model of political consensus in order to explain the missing link between inequality and political redistribution. Political consensus is an implicit agreement not to vote for extreme policy proposals. We show that such an agreement may play an efficiency-enhancing role. Voters anticipate that voting for extremist parties increases policy uncertainty in the future. A political consensus among voters reduces policy uncertainty because self-interested politicians propose non-discriminatory policies. We study how much inequality can be sustained in a democracy and how the limits to redistribution vary with initial inequality. The bounds of the set of political equilibria may react in a fundamentally different manner to changes in exogenous variables than do the policy variables in the one-dimensional, one-shot game. More initial inequality need not lead to more redistribution from the rich to the poor. The maximum amount of redistribution decreases with inequality if (and only if) agents are sufficiently patient. In this case inequality is politically self-sustaining.     

Public opinion on bilingual education in Colorado and Massachusetts

In 2002, voters in Massachusetts and Colorado faced identical ballot initiatives to remove bilingual education programs from the public schools. The measure passed in Massachusetts and failed in Colorado. This paper investigates the debates over the issue in these two states. It provides insight into how people reason with respect to minority politics. It also helps to make sense of the states’ divergent outcomes. Content analysis of letters-to-the-editor reveals that voters are motivated by ethnic competition and fiscal concerns, as existing theories would predict. Additionally, citizens debate which kinds of programs work best for English learners and take stands on how these youngsters can be successful in life. The inter-state comparison reveals that a major factor distinguishing the two statewide debates was ethnic paternalism, a logic often used by members of ethnic majorities to justify restrictive policy decisions on the basis of what they think is best for the affected population. The analysis shows that themes related to doing what is best for English learners were significantly more salient in Massachusetts than Colorado. This finding implies that where public debate over this issue is framed in terms of helping minority youth, the fate of bilingual education is not secure.