You Raise Me Up: The Social Identity Underpinnings of Campaign Contributions

A record number of individuals financially contributed to presidential candidates during the 2008 election cycle. Many academic researchers and pundits have speculated on why these individuals chose to participate in this manner, often asserting that donors likely anticipated a personal material or policy reward for their support. Others have suggested that social similarities between donor and candidate may have played an important role. Little research exists, however, on the impact that an individual’s affiliation with an “apolitical” social group can have on their contribution decisions. I use the term here to characterize a group whose primary purpose is something other than political in nature. For example, political actions are, arguably, a secondary decision for religious, business, ethnic, or gender groups. My findings suggest that such associations exert an important effect on an individual’s donation decisions and should be examined further in the future

Financing Direct Democracy: Revisiting the Research on Campaign Spending and Citizen Initiatives

The conventional view in the direct democracy literature is that spending against a measure is more effective than spending in favor of a measure, but the empirical results underlying this conclusion have been questioned by recent research. We argue that the conventional finding is driven by the endogenous nature of campaign spending: initiative proponents spend more when their ballot measure is likely to fail. We address this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach to analyze a comprehensive dataset of ballot propositions in California from 1976 to 2004. We find that both support and opposition spending on citizen initiatives have strong, statistically significant, and countervailing effects. We confirm this finding by looking at time series data from early polling on a subset of these measures. Both analyses show that spending in favor of citizen initiatives substantially increases their chances of passage, just as opposition spending decreases this likelihood

Voting Technology, Vote-by-Mail, and Residual Votes in California, 1990-2010

This paper examines how the growth in vote-by-mail and changes in voting technologies led to changes in the residual vote rate in California from 1990 to 2010. We find that in California’s presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. However, these findings do not always translate to other races. For instance, find that the InkaVote system in Los Angeles has been a mixed success, performing very well in presidential and gubernatorial races, fairly well for ballot propositions, and poorly in Senate races. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the race, increased use of the mails to cast ballots is robustly associated with a rise in the residual vote rate. The effect is so strong that the rise of voting by mail in California has mostly wiped out all the reductions in residual votes that were due to improved voting technologies since the early 1990s