Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment

Although the secret ballot has long been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we provided registered voters with information about ballot secrecy protections prior to the 2010 general election. We find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. These results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long-standing institution in the United States, providing basic information about ballot secrecy can affect the decision to participate to an important degree.

Ballot secrecy concerns and voter mobilization: new experimental evidence about message source, context, and the duration of mobilization effects

Recent research finds that doubts about the integrity of the secret ballot as an institution persist among the American public. We build on this finding by providing novel field experimental evidence about how information about ballot secrecy protections can increase turnout among registered voters who had not previously voted. First, we show that a private group’s mailing designed to address secrecy concerns modestly increased turnout in the highly contested 2012 Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election. Second, we exploit this and an earlier field experiment conducted in Connecticut during the 2010 congressional midterm election season to identify the persistent effects of such messages from both governmental and non-governmental sources. Together, these results provide new evidence about how message source and campaign context affect efforts to mobilize previous non-voters by addressing secrecy concerns, as well as show that attempting to address these beliefs increases long term participation

Self-interest, beliefs, and policy opinions: understanding how economic beliefs affect immigration policy preferences

Research on how economic factors affect attitudes toward immigration often focuses on labor market effects, concluding that, because workers’ skill levels do not predict opposition to low- versus highly skilled immigration, economic self-interest does not shape policy attitudes. We conduct a new survey to measure beliefs about a range of economic, political, and cultural consequences of immigration. When economic self-interest is broadened to include concerns about the fiscal burdens created by immigration, beliefs about these economic effects strongly correlate with immigration attitudes and explain a significant share of the difference in support for highly versus low-skilled immigration. Although cultural factors are important, our results suggest that previous work underestimates the importance of economic self-interest as a source of immigration policy preferences and attitudes more generally

Subtle linguistic cues may not affect voter behavior: new evidence

One of the most important recent developments in social psychology is the discovery of minor interventions that have large and enduring effects on behavior. A leading example of this class of results is Bryan et al. (2011), which shows that administering a set of survey items worded so that subjects think of themselves as voters (noun treatment) rather than as voting (verb treatment) substantially increases political participation (voter turnout) among subjects. We revisit these experiments by replicating and extending their research design in a large-scale field experiment. In contrast to the 11 to 14 percentage point greater turnout among those exposed to the noun rather than verb treatment reported in Bryan et al. (2011), we find no statistically significant difference in turnout between the noun and verb treatments (the point estimate of the difference is approximately zero). Further, when we benchmark these treatments against a standard get-outthe- vote message, we find that both are less effective at increasing turnout than a much shorter basic mobilization message. In sum, in our experiments, we find no evidence that describing a subject as a voter rather than as voting has a positive relative or absolute effect on subject behavior. In our conclusion, we detail how our study differs from Bryan et al. (2011) and discuss how our results might be interpreted

Identification of a non-purple tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase: an evolutionary link to Ser/Thr protein phosphatases?

BACKGROUND Tartrate-resistant acid phosphatases (TRAcPs), also known as purple acid phosphatases (PAPs), are a family of binuclear metallohydrolases that have been identified in plants, animals and fungi. The human enzyme is a major histochemical marker for the diagnosis of bone-related diseases. TRAcPs can occur as a small form possessing only the ~35 kDa catalytic domain, or a larger ~55 kDa form possessing both a catalytic domain and an additional N-terminal domain of unknown function. Due to its role in bone resorption the 35 kDa TRAcP has become a promising target for the development of anti-osteoporotic chemotherapeutics. FINDINGS A new human gene product encoding a metallohydrolase distantly related to the ~55 kDa plant TRAcP was identified and characterised. The gene product is found in a number of animal species, and is present in all tissues sampled by the RIKEN mouse transcriptome project. Construction of a homology model illustrated that six of the seven metal-coordinating ligands in the active site are identical to that observed in the TRAcP family. However, the tyrosine ligand associated with the charge transfer transition and purple color of TRAcPs is replaced by a histidine. CONCLUSION The gene product identified here may represent an evolutionary link between TRAcPs and Ser/Thr protein phosphatases. Its biological function is currently unknown but is unlikely to be associated with bone metabolism.This work was funded by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene through a Dennis Burkitt Fellowship to JJM. ARD is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. JJM is supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellowship (GR074833MA)

National interest may require distributing COVID-19 vaccines to other countries

As immunization campaigns are accelerating, understanding how to distribute the scarce doses of vaccines is of paramount importance and a quantitative analysis of the trade-offs involved in domestic-only versus cooperative distribution is still missing. In this study we use a network Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model to show circumstances under which it is in a country's self-interest to ensure other countries can obtain COVID-19 vaccines rather than focusing only on vaccination of their own residents. In particular, we focus our analysis on the United States and estimate the internal burden of COVID-19 disease under different scenarios about vaccine cooperation. We show that in scenarios in which the US has reached the threshold for domestic herd immunity, the US may find it optimal to donate doses to other countries with lower vaccination coverage, as this would allow for a sharp reduction in the inflow of infected individuals from abroad

Experimental evidence that changing beliefs about mask efficacy and social norms increase mask wearing for COVID-19 risk reduction:Results from the United States and Italy

In the absence of widespread vaccination for COVID-19, governments and public health officials have advocated for the public to wear masks during the pandemic. The decision to wear a mask in public is likely affected by both beliefs about its efficacy and the prevalence of the behavior. Greater mask use in the community may encourage others to follow this norm, but it also creates an incentive for individuals to free ride on the protection afforded to them by others. We report the results of two vignette-based experiments conducted in the United States (n = 3,100) and Italy (n = 2,659) to examine the causal relationship between beliefs, social norms, and reported intentions to engage in mask promoting behavior. In both countries, survey respondents were quota sampled to be representative of the country’s population on key demographics. We find that providing information about how masks protect others increases the likelihood that someone would wear a mask or encourage others to do so in the United States, but not in Italy. There is no effect of providing information about how masks protect the wearer in either country. Additionally, greater mask use increases intentions to wear a mask and encourage someone else to wear theirs properly in both the United States and Italy. Thus, community mask use may be self-reinforcing