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

Presidential preference primaries of 1972

honors thesisCollege of Social & Behavioral SciencePolitical ScienceThe major purpose of this examination is to evaluate the primaries of '72, in order to see how they function as a means of selecting a man for the Presidency. Since 1968, the election of convention delegates has taken an increasing number of forms as more states have opted for the primary. Delegates have been elected statewide, in congressional districts, or in a combination of the two ways. Their selection has been made by the voters either in conjunction with a Presidential preference primary or without one; and if there was such a poll, its results might or might not be binding on the delegates at the national convention. In a statewide primary, delegate seats might be alloted on a winner-take-all basis, as in California; or they might be allocated partly statewide and partly by congressional district, or they might be divided proportionately among the Presidential candidates according to their relative showing. The Presidential preference primary might include on the ballot all the serious candidates for the party nomination, or it might only include those candidates who choose to file in that state

2008 Utah Colleges Exit Poll - Special

Congress: Chaffetz vs. Cannon, vote confidence, immigration, candidate attributes, No Child Left Behind, abortion, and populism

1984 Utah Colleges Exit Poll

Presidential and statewide exit poll. President: Reagan vs. Mondale, Governor: Bangerter vs. Owens, Congressional races, information sources for Presidential Election, candidate favorability, and political parties in Utah

2006 Utah Colleges Exit Poll

Senate: Hatch vs. Ashdown, Congressional races, county Propositions, voting experience, immigration, candidate favorability ratings, Iraq War, and media