The Use of the Endorsement Heuristic in Swiss Popular Votes

There already exists an impressive body of literature studying the use of voting recommendations in elections and popular votes. The main shortcoming of most of these observational studies is the measurement of voting recommendations. There is rarely any direct evidence to show that voters did indeed follow a recommendation when making a vote decision. Thus, it is not clear how widespread the use of such voting endorsements is. We measured the use of endorsements by evaluating the voting motives reported by the voters themselves. Employing this measure, we could show that endorsements have an impact on Swiss referendum votes. Depending on the issue at stake, between 2 and 27 percent of the voters admitted that they based their decision on recommendations. Moreover, the use of endorsements heavily depends on motivation, project‐specific knowledge level, and degree of ambivalence towards the issue at stake. Zur Bedeutung von Empfehlungen in Wahlen und Abstimmungen wurde bereits ausgiebig geforscht. Indes, die meisten dieser nicht-experimentellen Untersuchungen weisen einen Mangel auf: Selten einmal wird die Verwendung von Empfehlungen direkt gemessen. Deshalb ist auch nicht klar, wie oft Stimmempfehlungen der Regierung, von Parteien oder anderen Akteuren bei Sachabstimmungen genutzt werden. Wir haben die Verwendung von Empfehlungen und Parolen direkt erhoben, indem wir die Motivangaben der Wählerinnen und Wähler auswerteten. Dabei zeigt sich, dass Empfehlungen von rund zwei bis maximal 27 Prozent der Stimmenden genutzt werden. Die Nutzung von Empfehlungen in Sachabstimmungen ist im Wesentlichen von der individuellen Motivation, der Vorlagenkenntnis und dem Überzeugungsgrad der Haltungen abhängig

Investigating the Longitudinal Relation Between Offending Frequency and Offending Variety

and the Arizona Governor’s Justice Commission. The authors are grateful for their support. The content of this article, however, is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of these agencies. Correspondence may be addressed to Alex R. Piquero at [email protected]

Designing Persuasion: Health Technology for Low-Income African American Communities

Abstract. In the United States, African Americans face a disproportionate amount of diet-related health problems. For example, African American adults are 1.6 times more likely to have diabetes than their Caucasian counterparts. Individuals in low-income communities may face a greater risk because they typically have less access to healthy foods. Due to the significant diet-related problems within the African American community, public health researchers call for approaches to health promotion that take into account the relationship between culture and dietary habits. In this paper, we discuss three important considerations for the design of technologies that address the diet-related health disparities in low-income African American communities. These considerations include designing for cultural relevancy, modeling health behavior, and encouraging healthy behavior through the use of social psychological theories of persuasion. We use a game design example to illustrate how each of these considerations can be incorporated into the development of new technology