Affective polarization, or relative dislike of opposing partisans, is associated with several negative outcomes for democracy. However, a number of studies argue that affective polarization has one ...positive democratic consequence: it spurs political participation. However, political participation, especially voting, is habitual, and the factors that spur people to start participating are not the same as those that sustain participation once it is initiated. Existing work does not address this distinction. Leveraging large-scale survey data linked to validated measures of turnout as well as panel data, this paper shows that affective polarization mainly serves to sustain existing habits of turnout. In contrast, there is little evidence that affective polarization motivates people who did not previously participate to begin doing so. These results indicate that instead of improving democratic outcomes, affective polarization exacerbates existing inequities in political participation.
A growing social science literature has used Twitter and Facebook to study political and social phenomena including for election forecasting and tracking political conversations. This research note ...uses a nationally representative probability sample of the British population to examine how Twitter and Facebook users differ from the general population in terms of demographics, political attitudes and political behaviour. We find that Twitter and Facebook users differ substantially from the general population on many politically relevant dimensions including vote choice, turnout, age, gender, and education. On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users, and they are more liberal and pay more attention to politics. Despite paying more attention to politics, social media users are less likely to vote than non-users, but they are more likely to support the left leaning Labour Party when they do vote. However, we show that these apparent differences mostly arise due to the demographic composition of social media users. After controlling for age, gender, and education, no statistically significant differences arise between social media users and non-users on political attention, values or political behaviour.
Las elecciones en el Sáhara Occidental constituyen una pieza clave en la estrategia de legitimación de la ocupación marroquí, al asociarlas con la voluntad del electorado saharaui de permanecer bajo ...su soberanía. De la misma manera, el personal político saharaui electo se reivindica en tanto que “representantes legítimos” en procesos decisorios que transcienden el territorio ocupado y que tocan a la pesca, un sector clave en la economía local. En el presente artículo, abordamos los elementos definitorios de tales procesos, en relación con las tasas de participación, poniendo en evidencia sus límites para producir representación más allá del contexto de ocupación.
Recent years have seen a dramatic change in horse-race coverage of elections in the United States—shifting focus from late-breaking poll numbers to sophisticated meta-analytic forecasts that ...emphasize candidates’ chance of victory. Could this shift in the political information environment affect election outcomes? We use experiments to show that forecasting increases certainty about an election’s outcome, confuses many, and decreases turnout. Furthermore, we show that election forecasting has become prominent in the media, particularly in outlets with liberal audiences, and show that such coverage tends to more strongly affect the candidate who is ahead—raising questions about whether they contributed to Trump’s victory over Clinton in 2016. We bring empirical evidence to this question, using American National Election Studies data to show that Democrats and Independents expressed unusual confidence in a decisive 2016 election outcome—and that the same measure of confidence is associated with lower reported turnout.
Field experiments and regression discontinuity designs test whether voting is habit forming by examining whether a random shock to turnout in one election affects participation in subsequent ...elections. We contribute to this literature by offering a vast amount of new statistical evidence on the long-term consequences of random and quasi-random inducements to vote. The behavior of millions of voters confirms the persistence of voter turnout and calls attention to theoretically meaningful nuances in the development and expression of voting habits. We suggest that individuals become habituated to voting in particular types of elections. The degree of persistence appears to vary by electoral context and by the attributes of those who comply with an initial inducement to vote.
We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification ...strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends. We focus our analysis on the years 1869–1928, and we use the remaining years of data to look at changes over time. We find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation, with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points. Newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout: our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market, and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller. The effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television, while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years. We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects. We find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents.
Zusammenfassung
Wahlbeteiligung und Engagementbereitschaft sind nicht nur von soziodemographischen Faktoren abhängig. Einfluss haben auch Strukturbedingungen von Regionen. Das konnte in dem ...Monitoring Demokratische Integration 2019, das hier vorgestellt wird, herausgearbeitet werden. Inwieweit Einstellungen zum demokratischen System mit Wahlaktivität und Engagement korrelieren, konnte im ersten Monitoring mangels verfügbarer Daten nicht geprüft werden. Um diese wichtigen Zusammenhänge für eine Fortsetzung des Monitorings einbeziehen zu können, wurden im Rahmen einer Vorstudie sowohl eine repräsentative Bevölkerungsbefragung durchgeführt als auch Datensätze identifiziert, die dies für die Zukunft möglich machen.
How does the context in which a person lives affect his or her political behavior? I exploit an event in which demographic context was exogenously changed, leading to a significant change in voters' ...behavior and demonstrating that voters react strongly to changes in an outgroup population. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the removal of their African American neighbors, the white voters' turnout dropped by over 10 percentage points. Consistent with psychological theories of racial threat, their change in behavior was a function of the size and proximity of the outgroup population. Proximity was also related to increased voting for conservative candidates. These findings strongly suggest that racial threat occurs because of attitude change rather than selection.
Overconfidence in Political Behavior Ortoleva, Pietro; Snowberg, Erik
The American economic review,
02/2015, Letnik:
105, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological ...extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger partisan identification. The model also makes nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society. These predictions are tested using unique data that measure the overconfidence and standard political characteristics of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. Our numerous predictions find strong support in these data. In particular, we document that overconfidence is a substantively and statistically important predictor of ideological extremeness, voter turnout, and partisan identification.
Most nonexperimental studies of voter turnout rely on survey data. However, surveys overestimate turnout because of (1) nonresponse bias and (2) overreporting. We investigate this possibility using a ...rich dataset of Danish voters, which includes validated turnout indicators from administrative data for both respondents and nonrespondents, as well as respondents’ self-reported voting from the Danish National Election Studies. We show that both nonresponse bias and overreporting contribute significantly to overestimations of turnout. Further, we use covariates from the administrative data available for both respondents and nonrespondents to demonstrate that both factors also significantly bias the predictors of turnout. In our case, we find that nonresponse bias and overreporting masks a gender gap of two and a half percentage points in women’s favor as well as a gap of 25 percentage points in ethnic Danes’ favor compared with Danes of immigrant heritage.
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