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

Can political participation prevent crime? Results from a field experiment about citizenship, participation, and criminality

Democratic theory and prior empirical work support the view that political participation, by promoting social integration and pro-social attitudes, reduces one’s propensity for anti-social behavior, such as committing a crime. Previous investigations examine observational data, which are vulnerable to bias if omitted factors affect both propensity to participate and risk of criminality or their reports.A field experiment encouraging 552,525 subjects aged 18-20 to register and vote confirms previous observational findings of the negative association between participation and subsequent criminality. However, comparing randomly formed treatment and control groups reveals that the intervention increased participation but did not reduce subsequent criminality. Our results suggest that while participation is correlated with criminality, it exerts no causal effect on subsequent criminal behavior

Does incarceration reduce voting? Evidence about the political consequences of spending time in prison

The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that both lead to incarceration and low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely

Rapid Bacteria Detection from Patients' Blood Bypassing Classical Bacterial Culturing.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition mostly caused by a bacterial infection resulting in inflammatory reaction and organ dysfunction if not treated effectively. Rapid identification of the causing bacterial pathogen already in the early stage of bacteremia is therefore vital. Current technologies still rely on time-consuming procedures including bacterial culturing up to 72 h. Our approach is based on ultra-rapid and highly sensitive nanomechanical sensor arrays. In measurements we observe two clearly distinguishable distributions consisting of samples with bacteria and without bacteria respectively. Compressive surface stress indicates the presence of bacteria. For this proof-of-concept, we extracted total RNA from EDTA whole blood samples from patients with blood-culture-confirmed bacteremia, which is the reference standard in diagnostics. We determined the presence or absence of bacterial RNA in the sample through 16S-rRNA hybridization and species-specific probes using nanomechanical sensor arrays. Via both probes, we identified two clinically highly-relevant bacterial species i.e., Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus down to an equivalent of 20 CFU per milliliter EDTA whole blood. The dynamic range of three orders of magnitude covers most clinical cases. We correctly identified all patient samples regarding the presence or absence of bacteria. We envision our technology as an important contribution to early and sensitive sepsis diagnosis directly from blood without requirement for cultivation. This would be a game changer in diagnostics, as no commercial PCR or POCT device currently exists who can do this