Christopher Achen

Princeton University | PU · Department of Politics

We argue that two different sets of considerations shape the decision to vote or abstain in an election–ethical and non-ethical. First the citizen may vote out of a sense of duty. Failing that, she may vote because she has strong preferences about the outcome of the election. Abstention occurs when neither duty nor a sufficiently strong preference...

Taiwan's voter turnout has declined nearly fifteen percentage points since the early 2000s. All ages voted less in 2016 than before, but the drop was particularly severe among younger voters, who turned out at rates up to twenty percentage points lower than in 2004. Thus Taiwan resembles other mature democracies like the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and F...

Society changes with the addition of new members. Different generations have distinct historical experiences, which may shape their political stance across a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. This symposium includes four articles analyzing generational politics in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The studies show that there are behavioral and attitudinal d...

If representative democracy is not about elected officials responding directly to voters’ preferences, and if the voters do a poor job of voting their interests in referendums, then what is democracy about? In our view, a satisfactory theory of democracy would focus normatively on the social identities and political interests of citizens rather tha...

Anthony Fowler and Andrew Hall question both the statistical validity and the broader significance of our analysis of the electoral impact of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916. Setting aside the politics and history of the Progressive period, they focus on methodological considerations, carrying out an extensive set of tests intended to...

Shifting Standards for Political Methodologists? Historical Trends in the Society for Political Methodology - Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Christopher H. Achen

Conventional accounts of how democracy works are flawed on a fundamental level, argue Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels. By accounting for the ways social identities shape voting behaviour, they present a new model that not only offers greater intellectual clarity but could make genuine political change possible.

The Voting and Registration Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) employs a large sample size and has a very high response rate, and thus is often regarded as the gold standard among turnout surveys. In 2008, however, the CPS inaccurately estimated that presidential turnout had undergone a small decrease from 2004. We show that growing...

Pre-election “intention to vote” has come to substitute for “reported vote” or “validated vote” in many studies of turnout. The differences among them have been little studied. In this report, we examine all three jointly in a single U.S. dataset for what we believe is the first time. We find that the same variables tend to be influential for all t...

A sense of citizen duty is a powerful predictor of voter turnout, yet it has often been misunderstood or neglected entirely in empirical studies. By contrast, political theory has developed a rich literature on the obligations of democratic citizens. Using two recent panel studies in the United States and Canada, we show that a new statistical mode...

Abstract Alone among modern democracies, the United States makes voter registration a personal responsibility rather than a governmental function. In almost all states, registration dead- lines occur well before elections. Failure to register by the deadline makes,the probability of voting exactly zero. This sequential feature of the registration a...

We set out a simple Bayesian model for turnout at the polls by expressive voters. We show that it mathematically implies the standard empirical findings about turnout. We also show that it implies a new estimator for turnout, "double probit." Applications of the model to large American and Irish datasets demonstrate that the new model gives better...

We examine how the notion of popular sovereignty has animated the evolution of American political institutions. We argue that the triumph of democratic rhetoric at the Founding has left Americans with just one remedy in times of governmental failure, namely that reform should move toward greater democratization. More "democratic" institutions have...

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of d...

The familiar image of rational electoral choice has voters weighing the com-peting candidates' strengths and weaknesses, calculating comparative dis-tances in issue space, and assessing the president's management of foreign a¤airs and the national economy. Indeed, once or twice in a lifetime, a national or personal crisis does induce political thou...

Close studies of governmental decisions in democracies commonly divide the process into two stages. First, the actors bargain. As Arthur Bentley (1967 [1908]: 371) put it nearly a century ago in describing the legislative process, ‘It is compromise … It is trading. It is the adjustment of interests.’ This stage may include information-gathering and...

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of d...

Abstract Voting is an expressive act. Since people are not born wanting,to express themselves,politi- cally, the desire to vote must be acquired, either by learning about the candidates, by using party identi…cation as a cognitive shortcut, or by contact from a trusted source. Modeled as Bayesian updating, this simple explanatory framework has dram...

Many social scientists believe that dumping long lists of explanatory variables into linear regression, probit, logit, and other statistical equations will successfully “control” for the effects of auxiliary factors. Encouraged by convenient software and ever more powerful computing, researchers also believe that this conventional approach gives th...

Two-step estimators for hierarchical models can be constructed even when neither stage is a conventional linear regression model. For example, the first stage might consist of probit models, or duration models, or event count models. The second stage might be a nonlinear regression specification. This note sketches some of the considerations that a...

In spring 2002, APSA President-Elect Theda Skocpol appointed this Task Force on Graduate Education, representing a variety of institutions, political science subfields, scholarly backgrounds, and methodological viewpoints. She asked its members to report on ways to strengthen graduate education in political science. The Task Force quickly concluded...

We have argued elsewhere that retrospective voting is often causally unsophisticated, ideologically confused, and highly myopic (Achen and Bartels 2002; 2004). Here, we extend those assertions to party realignments, arguing that they, too, depend far less on ideological shifts than on the simple cumulation of myopic retrospections in election years...

Abstract The best current defense of democracy is the theory of retrospective voting. Citizens may not know much about the issues, the argument goes, but they can tell good from bad outcomes, and that allows them to remove incompetent or corrupt incumbents. Moreover, knowing that the voters use that rule, every government will have every incentive...

s Abstract The past two decades have brought revolutionary change to the field of political methodology. Steady gains in theoretical sophistication have combined with explosive increases in computing power to produce a profusion of new estimators for applied political researchers. Attendance at the annual Summer Meeting of the Methodology Section h...

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the f...

Many advocates of democracy believe that it is the most responsive form of government, but acknowledge that citizens are remarkably ignorant and frequently unable to connect their preferences to their political choices. Squaring these two judgments has proven very difficult. To begin doing so, we examine a stylized world in which two parties compet...

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