Sociotropic Voting and the Media

The literature on economic voting notes that voters' subjective evaluations of the overall state of the economy are correlated with vote choice, whereas personal economic experiences are not (Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981). Missing from this literature is a description of how voters acquire information about the general state of the economy and use that information to form perceptions. To begin understanding this process, we asked a series of questions on the 2006 ANES Pilot Study about respondents' perceptions of the average price of gas and the unemployment rate in their home states. In this chapter, we analyze both the determinants and political consequences of respondents' perceptions of these economic variables. Questions about gas prices and unemployment show differences in respondents' sources of information about these two economic variables. We found evidence consistent with the idea that information about unemployment rates comes from media sources, and is biased by partisan factors, and that information about gas prices comes only from everyday experiences. While information about both indicators shows effects from demographics, only estimates of unemployment rates are correlated with a respondent's political outlook. Moreover, perceptions of unemployment rates can be used to isolate the effect of economics on partisan preferences

Unrepresentative information - The case of newspaper reporting on campaign finance

This article examines evidence of sampling or statistical bias in newspaper reporting on campaign finance. We compile all stories from the five largest circulation newspapers in the United States that mention a dollar amount for campaign expenditures, contributions, or receipts from 1996 to 2000. We compare these figures to those recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The average figures reported in newspapers exceed the figures from the FEC by as much as eightfold. Press reports also focus excessively on corporate contributions and soft money, rather than on the more common types of donors-individual-and types of contributions-hard money. We further find that these biases are reflected in public perceptions of money in elections. Survey respondents overstate the amount of money raised and the share from different groups by roughly the amount found in newspapers, and better-educated people (those most likely to read newspapers) showed the greatest discrepancy between their beliefs and the facts

Is There Racial Discrimination at the Polls? Voters' Experience in the 2008 Election

In 1965, the United States Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act to end discrimination against black voters at the polls in Southern states and throughout the nation. The Act prohibited the use of “tests” and other devices used to prevent people from voting. At issue was not the content of tests themselves but the wide latitude available to those charged with registering and authenticating voters. Poll workers and election officers applied literacy tests, poll taxes, and other mechanisms differentially to voters according to race, resulting in extremely low rates of voter registration and participation among blacks and Hispanics. Forty years after the Voting Rights Act went into effect, concerns about discriminatory treatment and differential consequences of election administration practice have returned. General polling place operations are alleged to be much worse in areas where large numbers of minorities vote, yielding long lines. Procedures for maintaining registration lists are thought to make it more likely that there will be an improper purge of minority voters, leading to more problems with registration on Election Day. And, voter identification requirements, which states have strengthened considerably since 2000, are alleged to be applied more frequently and strictly to Black and Hispanic voters than to Whites. This paper examines the experiences of voters expressed in two surveys, the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey and a 2008 survey conducted by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project with support of the Pew Foundation. Both surveys were conducted over the Internet by YouGov. The CCES has a sample of 32,800 respondents, and the VTP-Pew Survey has a sample of 12,000 respondents. In addition to the Internet component, the VTP-Pew survey contains a separate phone sample used to validate the surveys. Additional information about these surveys is available at the websites of the CCES (http://web.mit.edu/polisci/portl/cces/index.html) and the Voting Technology Project (www.vote.caltech.edu)

Access Versus Integrity in Voter Identification Requirements

The Help America Vote Act hit a nearly fatal snag during the final stages of congressional negotiations over the bill in 2002. The problem? Voter identification requirements. Many conservatives in Congress insisted on the inclusion of a requirement that voters show photo identification, and many liberals, especially the Congressional Black Caucus, saw this as a deal killer. Ultimately, the two sides reached a compromise that applied the rule to first time voters, but the battle lines over this question were drawn and they remain in place today

Cuentos de la Pampa. Los casos de Alberto Ghiraldo y Benito Lynch.

Sin resume

Why Is There So Little Money in Politics?

In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years: if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators' votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question.

The Introduction of Voter Registration and Its Effect on Turnout

Voter registration, it is widely argued, raises the costs of voting, thereby decreasing turnout. Studies of turnout across states find that states with later registration dates or election day registration have much higher turnout rates. Eliminating registration barriers altogether is estimated to raise voter participation rates by 5 to 10 percentage points. This paper presents panel estimates of the effects of the introduction of registration that exploit changes in registration law and turnout within counties. New York imposed registration on all of its counties in 1965; Ohio imposed registration in all of its counties in 1977. We estimate that the imposition of registration on counties that did not have registration in these states decreased participation over the long-term by 3 to 4 percentage points. Though significant, this is lower than estimates of the effects of registration from cross-sectional studies