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Ballot Order in Cueless Elections: A Comparison of Municipal and Provincial Elections in Québec
Abstract
This paper studies the prevalence of ballot order effects in two different types of Canadian elections which differ greatly by the strength of party cues they provide to voters. Provincial elections are best described as a typical competition between well established and institutionalized parties, hence providing voters with strong party cues. Alternatively, municipal politics provide voters with much weaker party cues. We use electoral results from recent provincial and municipal elections in Québec and find ballot order effects in municipal elections but not in provincial ones. Although ballot order effects may also be the product of alphabetic preference bias, we argue that in any case these are cognitive biases that are ultimately the product of insufficient cues that voters need in order to cast well-informed votes. The paper, therefore, sheds some light on an understudied type of election in political science.
... These heuristics include not only straightforward political markers such as party labels (e.g. Tomz and Van Houweling 2009;Tessier and Blanchet 2017), but also candidate identity markers that are assumed to provide relevant information. Indeed, this is an incredibly widespread phenomenon, ranging from gender (e.g. ...
... The trade-off, however, is a certain loss of realism: despite the presence of non-partisan elections and "independent" elected officials at lower levels of government, party labels are of course central to national elections in all three countries under study; and these labels have been shown to matter for political behavior across our cases -reducing, for example, the extent to which voters project their own attitudes onto candidates (e.g. Banducci et al. 2008;Tomz and Van Houweling 2009;Tessier and Blanchet 2017). The specific choice of a centrist baseline, in turn, allows for a symmetrical comparison of left-and right-wing responses. ...
Research suggests that voters use identity markers to infer information about candidates for office. Yet politicians have various markers that often point in conflicting directions, and it is unclear how citizens respond to competing signals-especially outside of a few highly stigmatized groups in the US. Given the relevance of these issues for electoral behavior and patterns of representation, this article examines the impact of intersectional identities and less intensely stigmatized markers in Canada, the UK, and the US. It does so using a survey experiment that varies the race (white/East Asian) and class background (higher/lower) of a candidate for office. We then compare results across our cases, examining willingness to vote for the candidate as well as assumptions about his ideological proximity, relatability, and potential contributions. In doing so, we build from past research suggesting that voter ideology likely shapes reactions to candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. Results suggest that marginalized identity markers have relatively widespread effects among leftists and (to a lesser extent) centrists, but that, outside of the Canadian left, class seems to matter more than race. Overlapping marginalized identities, in turn, had little impact, with the lower-class white and East-Asian profiles eliciting similar reactions.
... Au Canada, le vote sur enjeu a été étudié en détails pour comprendre le comportement électoral au niveau fédéral (Anderson et Stephenson, 2011 ;Gidengil, 1992), mais il est moins sûr qu'il joue un rôle aussi important au niveau municipal. Pour cause, les élections locales fournissent aux citoyens concernés peu d'informations politiques à propos des candidatures ou des programmes et ont tendance à ne pas être organisées de façon cohérente par les médias (Cutler et Matthews, 2005 ;Tessier et Blanchet, 2018). Cela rend donc beaucoup plus difficile l'identification des candidats les plus aptes à répondre aux différents enjeux. ...
Résumé
Les élections municipales de 2021 à la Ville de Québec ont été marquées par une forte compétition entre cinq candidats et une saillance des enjeux concernant la construction d'un tramway et d'un troisième lien autoroutier entre Québec et sa Rive-Sud. Ainsi, cette élection représente un contexte idéal pour étudier le comportement électoral au niveau local et plus spécifiquement le vote sur enjeu qui a été très peu étudié dans le contexte municipal. Nous soutenons que ces deux enjeux ont acquis une valeur symbolique et ont été exploités comme enjeu de brèche par le candidat à la mairie Jean-François Gosselin. À l'aide d'une analyse multivariée, nous testons la relation entre l'appui aux deux projets de transport et l'intention de vote. Nos résultats montrent que les attitudes des électeurs envers ces deux enjeux sont fortement corrélées avec leur choix de vote et suggèrent une continuité entre le comportement électoral municipal, provincial et fédéral, du moins lorsqu'il est question de vote sur les enjeux.
... This important strand of literature suggests that second-order elections, i.e., local, regional, and supranational, are perceived to be much less important so that they leave room for all kinds of considerations that have little to do with the policies that the elected representatives are and should be held responsible for. For example, trivial considerations such as ballot order affected the candidates' vote share in the 2009 and 2013 Quebec municipal (local) elections (Tessier and Blanchet, 2018). However, some research has provided a more nuanced picture. ...
... Both representative and direct democracy in most cases demand to mark one box, hence dividing voters into mutually exclusive subsets. Without partitioning, paper-and-pencil-ballots lead into cognitive problems [18] and the usage of inadequate cues as name orders [19][20][21][22]. ...
This project submitted to the Swiss National Science Foundation explores civil-society based decision making (CSBD), an upstream proposal regarding the digital-ization of politics that eases direct-democratic decision-making through allowing to store trust in political actors who provide decision proposals and serve as representation if no direct decision is made. By doing so, it contributes to a larger question emerged in the intersection of research in institutions and social structure: (1) Are actors able to exert responsibility in a world of overlapping loyalities, weak ties, and multiple identities with CSBD? We furthermore ask (2) how it will be used, (3) how it will perform in relation to established criteria, and (4) what avenues of further development may be advisable. The research plan revolves around the idea of implementing CSBD empirically and consists of three parts: (1) the development of an device-independent application including backend that provides a minimum viable prototype of a CSBD system [1-5], (2) the dissemination and invitation to participate in using this prototype, and (3) the core research to answer the four questions above with the collection, analysis, interpretation and communication of data from user interaction and from qualitative and quantitative interviews. 2 Research plan 2.1 Relevance with regard to the issues addressed in the call The digitalization of economic and social life and individualization processes independent from technological development have continued and accentuated a change in trust relations from group to general network structures. Groups still do play a role, but no longer in the form of large social segments which comprise their members with their complete identity (predominantly defined as occupation-based classes), but in the form of overlapping group relations of which any individual builds a unique set of relations. The project hence gives an upstream answer, contributing to further development, to the question "How is digitalisation transforming politics?" addressed in the call that is based on a thorough sociological theory of social development. While many current scholars have a rather negative view on the effect of digital media on political processes [6-10], the ability of digital technologies to offer flexible trust storage can lead to a renewed form of democratic decision-making that combines stability and popular responsibility. Current participation models are often shaped by the paradox that more tools create less participation due to inefficiencies in how participation is used.[11] Since the principle of CSBD allows to cope more efficiently with available perceptions and interactions of voters and sets incentives for offline interaction, it may overcome these paradoxes. Based on a long history of representative and direct democracy in a continuously evolved interplay, Swiss political institutions are well equipped to handle problems of individualization and new inequalities without using digital technologies. But even here, including civil society into a framework of improved responsibility and creativity may improve specific processes, for example in the formulation of counter proposals to initiatives or in the integration of non-citizens into Swiss institutions, the former by allow a discussion over more options and the latter by extending participation beyond national identity and allowing individuals from weak and non-democracies to experience the process of democratic decision-making directly.
In ranked-choice elections, voters vote by indicating their preference orderings over the candidates. A ballot is truncated when the ordering is incomplete (called partial voting). Sometimes truncation is forced—voters are allowed to rank only a limited number of candidates—but sometimes it is voluntary. During the vote tabulating process, a truncated ballot is exhausted when all of the candidates it ranks have been eliminated. Ballot exhaustion and, therefore ballot truncation, is a concern in single-winner elections when the margin of victory in the final stage is less than the number of exhausted ballots. That concern motivates our study. We review evidence from actual single-winner ranked-choice elections and conclude that voluntary ballot truncation is very common. Moreover, it is difficult to explain strategically. To assess the significance of ballot truncation, we simulate ranked-choice elections with four, five and six candidates, using both spatial and random models of voter preferences. Does truncation change the probability that a Condorcet winner wins the election? Does the winner change as the extent of truncation increases? We find that even small amounts of truncation can alter election outcomes.
Although some past studies suggest that candidates may receive more votes when their names are listed first among their competitors
than when they are listed later, two recent studies challenged this conclusion with regard to major-party candidates running
in statewide races and raised questions about the impact of analytic methods on the conclusions of name-order research. Using
the largest data set to date—a set of quasi-randomized natural experiments involving 402 candidates running in 76 statewide
California elections—this study tests a series of hypotheses about the conditions under which name-order effects are most
likely. Regardless of the analytic method used, a small primacy effect appeared consistently that could have a substantive
impact on some contests. This effect was larger in races for lower-visibility offices, in years with higher turnout, and in
races that were not close. All of this is consistent with the claim that name-order effects occur among voters who have little
or no information about the candidates or among voters who feel ambivalence about the candidates.
Past studies of elections have shown that candidates whose names were listed at the beginning of a list on a ballot often received more votes by virtue of their position. This article tests speculations about the cognitive mechanisms that might be responsible for producing the effect. In an experiment embedded in a large national Internet survey, participants read about the issue positions of two hypothetical candidates and voted for one of them in a simulated election in which candidate name order was varied. The expected effect of position appeared and was strongest (1) when participants had less information about the candidates on which to base their choices, (2) when participants felt more ambivalent about their choices, (3) among participants with more limited cognitive skills, and (4) among participants who devoted less effort to the candidate evaluation process. The name-order effect was greater among left-handed people when the candidate names were arrayed horizontally, but there was no difference between left- and right-handed people when the names were arrayed vertically. These results reinforce some broad theoretical accounts of the cognitive process that yield name-order effects in elections.
We examine two sources of political inequalities that seem inevitable in elections, supposedly the most egalitarian and most fundamental of modern democratic processes. The first stems from the fact that not everyone is equally likely to vote, and the second from unequal political information levels, which may make some groups of citizens better able than others to express their political preferences in the vote. We use survey data from two economically less advanced new democracies to empirically assess the degree to which inequalities of turnout and political information level may influence election outcomes. Our statistical analysis relies on simulation methods developed by Bartels (1996) and Citrin, Schickler, and Sides (2003). For the first time in the literature, we provide separate estimates of how equally large increases in everyone's knowledge and how a complete equalization of knowledge level across social groups may affect election outcomes. Our results show that election outcomes in Romania and Moldova may be a little different if citizens were much better informed. However, we find no change in the outcomes as a result of an equalization of turnout and information level across social groups. Thus, elections in the two countries aggregate citizen preferences probably imperfectly, but in a definitely egalitarian way.
The class of beta regression models is commonly used by practitioners to model variables that assume values in the standard unit interval (0,1). It is based on the assumption that the dependent variable is beta-distributed and that its mean is related to a set of regressors through a linear predictor with unknown coefficients and a link function. The model also includes a precision parameter which may be constant or depend on a (potentially different) set of regressors through a link function as well. This approach naturally incorporates features such as heteroskedasticity or skewness which are commonly observed in data taking values in the standard unit interval, such as rates or proportions. This paper describes the betareg package which provides the class of beta regressions in the R system for statistical computing. The underlying theory is briefly outlined, the implementation discussed and illustrated in various replication exercises.
What would have happened in general elections if all voters had more closely approximated the democratic ideal of a ‘fully informed’ voter? Earlier analyses have demonstrated politically consequential effects of political information on American voters’ political preferences. In an effort to expand the validity of these results, the author of this article performed counterfactual analyses of aggregate election outcomes in six Swedish general elections from 1985 to 2002. The analyses show that the aggregated gains for right-wing parties average +2.1 percentage points during the period. In two elections, the outcome would have resulted in a different government majority. The findings challenge a widespread idea that voters’ extensive use of cognitive heuristics can compensate fully for their lack of factual knowledge. This article demonstrates that factual knowledge can indeed have significant effects in places where one would least expect it – in a Northern European multiparty context where voters are renowned for making extensive use of cognitive heuristics.
Simulations of changing levels of political knowledge among Danish voters in the 1971 and 2005 general elections reveal a
strong impact on party choice. The analysis advances previous simulations from the American two-party system to a multiparty
system by applying survey data from the Danish Election Studies. In both multiparty elections, the impact of information has
significant consequences for party choice. In 1971, political knowledge seems to be the variable connecting class with party
choice, whereas political knowledge seems to be the variable connecting issues with party choice in 2005. The information
effects are greater than the effects observed in similar analyses of the American two-party system, thus suggesting a positive
relationship between the number of parties and the impact of political knowledge. Finally, the analysis supports the notion
that right-leaning parties tend to fare better if political knowledge increases.
Model formulas are the standard approach for specifying the variables in statistical models in the S language. Although being eminently useful in an extremely wide class of applications, they have certain limitations including being confined to single responses and not providing convenient support for processing formulas with multiple parts. The latter is relevant for models with two or more sets of variables, e.g., different equations for different model parameters (such as mean and dispersion), regressors and instruments in instrumental variable regressions, two-part models such as hurdle models, or alternative-specific and individual-specific variables in choice models among many others. The R package Formula addresses these two problems by providing a new class “Formula” (inheriting from “formula”) that accepts an additional formula operator | separating multiple parts and by allowing all formula operators (including the new |) on the left-hand side to support multiple responses.
Perceived obligations of citizen duty may compel some people to cast votes in democratic elections even when they lack sufficient information to make informed choices. Psychological theories of choice suggest that, under such circumstances, voters may be influenced by the order in which candidates' names appear on the ballot, biasing people toward candidates listed early (when voters can generate reasons to vote for the candidates) or late (when voters can only generate reasons to vote against the candidates). Consistent with this reasoning, analyses of 1992 election returns in Ohio revealed that reliable name-order effects appeared in 48 percent of 118 races, nearly always advantaging candidates listed first, by an average of 2.5 percent. These effects were stronger in races when party affiliations were not listed, when races had been minimally publicized, and when no incumbent was involved. Furthermore, name-order effects were stronger in counties where voters were less knowledgeable about politics. All of this suggests that ballot structure influences election outcomes when voters lack substantive bases for candidate preferences. However, the magnitude of name-order effects observed here suggests that they have probably done little to undermine the democratic process in contemporary America.
Previous research has documented effects of the order in which response choices are offered to respondents using closed-ended
survey items, but no theory of the psychological sources of these effects has yet been proposed. This paper offers such a
theory drawn from a variety of psychological research. Using data from a split-ballot experiment in the 1984 General Social
Survey involving a variant of Kohn's parental values measure, we test some predictions made by the theory about what kind
of response order effect would be expected (a primacy effect) and among which respondents it should be strongest (those low
in cognitive sophistication). These predictions are confirmed. We also test the “form-resistant correlation” hypothesis. Although
correlations between items are altered by changes m response order, the presence and nature of the latent value dimension
underlying these responses is essentially unaffected.
Contemporary research on attitude change processes is reviewed for implications regarding the relative influence of successive opposing messages on final judgements. Based on this review, extent of message relevant elaboration is offered as a moderator of primacy versus recency effects in prior research. Support for this view is derived from the ability to explain the results of pervious studies and from two experiments in which message presentation order and personal relevance of the topic are manipulated in a factorial design. We find that situations that foster high levels of message elaboration lead to greater influence of an initial message on final judgments (a primacy effect) whereas situations that foster low levels of message relevant elaboration lead to greater influence of a second message on final judgments (a recency effect). Copyright 1994 by the University of Chicago.
Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, this book offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favour and oppose politically. Reacting against the conventional wisdom, which stresses how little attention the general public pays to political issues and the lack of consistency in their opinions, the studies presented in this book redirect attention to the processes of reasoning that can be discerned when people are confronted with choices about political issues. These studies demonstrate that ordinary people are in fact capable of reasoning dependably about political issues by the use of judgmental heuristics, even if they have only a limited knowledge of politics and of specific issues.
Using a vast swath of data spanning the past six decades, Unequal Democracy debunks many myths about politics in contemporary America, using the widening gap between the rich and the poor to shed disturbing light on the workings of American democracy. Larry Bartels shows the gap between the rich and poor has increased greatly under Republican administrations and decreased slightly under Democrats, leaving America grossly unequal. This is not simply the result of economic forces, but the product of broad-reaching policy choices in a political system dominated by partisan ideologies and the interests of the wealthy. Bartels demonstrates that elected officials respond to the views of affluent constituents but ignore the views of poor people. He shows that Republican presidents in particular have consistently produced much less income growth for middle-class and working-poor families than for affluent families, greatly increasing inequality. He provides revealing case studies of key policy shifts contributing to inequality, including the massive Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the erosion of the minimum wage. Finally, he challenges conventional explanations for why many voters seem to vote against their own economic interests, contending that working-class voters have not been lured into the Republican camp by "values issues" like abortion and gay marriage, as commonly believed, but that Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth to cater to short-sighted voters. Unequal Democracy is social science at its very best. It provides a deep and searching analysis of the political causes and consequences of America's growing income gap, and a sobering assessment of the capacity of the American political system to live up to its democratic ideals.
Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. This study, the first comprehensive treatment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality in opinion surveys, suggests some surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is distributed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect disproportionately the opinions of some groups more than others. Sometimes collective preferences seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not. Sometimes they rigidly enforce political equality in the expression of political viewpoints, but often they do not. The primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research. Rather, it is the limited degree of knowledge held by ordinary citizens about public affairs. Accounting for these factors can help survey researchers, journalists, politicians, and concerned citizens better appreciate the pitfalls and possibilities for using opinion polls to represent the people's voice.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
Theory: Recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues, information shortcuts, and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act, individually or collectively, ns if they were fully informed. Hypotheses: Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave ns if they were fully informed. Failing that, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcome ns if voters were fully informed. Methods: Hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics, estimated by probit analysis of data from National Election Study surveys conducted after the six most recent United States presidential elections. Results: Both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed. At the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical ''fully informed'' vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better, and Democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been ''fully informed.''
An experiment examined the impact of mental fatigue on impression formation. Subjects experiencing fatigue as a result of participation in a lengthy final examination at a university manifested greater magnitude of primacy effects in impressions than did nonfatigued subjects. Those differences disappeared when subjects were held accountable for their impressions. The findings are discussed in reference to the possibility that fatigue renders information processing subjectively costly inducing the need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski, in press) promoting a “freezing” on impressions implied by early information about a social target. Similarly, need for closure is assumed to be lowered by accountability concerns. This analysis is discussed in light of the alternative possibility that the effects of fatigue on impressions stem from a depletion of cognitive capacity.
Since the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, social scientists have rediscovered a long tradition of research examining the effects of ballot format on voting. Using a new dataset collected by The New York Times, we investigate the causal effect of being listed on the first ballot page in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. California law mandates a unique randomization procedure of ballot order that, when appropriately modeled, can be used to approximate a classical randomized experiment in a real world setting. We apply randomization inference based on Fisher's exact test, which directly incorporates the exact randomization procedure and yields accurate nonparametric confidence intervals. Our results suggest that being listed on the first ballot page causes a statistically significant increase in vote shares for more than 40% of the minor candidates, whereas there is no significant effect for the top two candidates. We also investigate how randomization inference differs from conventional e...
Can good or bad mood influence the common tendency for people to form judgments based on first impressions? Based on research on impression formation and recent work on affect and social cognition, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood increased, and negative mood eliminated the primacy effect. After an autobiographical mood induction (recalling happy or sad past events), participants (N=284) formed impressions about a character, Jim described either in an introvert–extrovert, or an extrovert–introvert sequence (Luchins, 1958). Impression formation judgments revealed clear mood and primacy main effects, as well as a mood by primacy interaction. Primacy effects were increased by positive mood, consistent with the more assimilative, holistic processing style associated with positive affect. Negative mood in turn eliminated primacy effects, consistent with a more accommodative, externally focused processing style. The relevance of these findings for first impressions in everyday judgments is considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.
Randomized natural experiments provide social scientists with rare opportunities to draw credible causal inferences in real-world settings. We capitalize on such a unique experiment to examine how the name order of candidates on ballots affects election outcomes. Since 1975, California has randomized the ballot order for statewide offices with a complex alphabet lottery. Adapting statistical techniques to this lottery and addressing methodological problems of conventional approaches, our analysis of statewide elections from 1978 to 2002 reveals that, in general elections, ballot order significantly impacts only minor party candidates, with no detectable effects on major party candidates. These results contradict previous research, finding large effects in general elections for major party candidates. In primaries, however, we show that being listed first benefits everyone. Major party candidates generally gain one to three percentage points, while minor party candidates may double their vote shares. In all elections, the largest effects are for nonpartisan races, where candidates in first position gain three percentage points.
The serial position effects for television commercials were tested within a naturalistic setting in this study, at both the micro level and the macro level. Television viewers' brand memory (recall and recognition) for the 2006 Super Bowl commercials were analyzed. At the micro level, the serial position of each commercial in a same commercial pod was measured. When the length of a commercial pod was controlled for, an earlier position for a commercial generated better brand recall. When the number of preceding ads was held constant, a commercial in a pod with fewer ads generated better brand recognition. At the macro level, the serial position of each commercial pod within the whole Super Bowl game broadcast was measured. The commercial pods at earlier positions generated better brand memory. Both findings confirmed a strong primacy effect. Managerial implications of the findings were also discussed.
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This article assesses the aggregate effect of information shortfall on the outcome of the last six Canadian elections. Building on Bartels' analysis, the authors find an information effect in three of the six elections examined, and in each case the information gap benefits the Liberal Party. That finding raises the question: why does information matter in some contexts but not in others? It is argued in this article that the information gap is related to lack of visibility. When and where all political parties have some degree of visibility, the less informed vote like the better informed, but when and where a party is hardly visible, the less informed are less likely to support that party. The less informed appear to consider a smaller set of options when they decide how to vote.
This article presents evidence of name-order effects in balloting from a study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York City, in which the order of candidates’ names was rotated by precinct. In 71 of 79 individual nominating contests, candidates received a greater proportion of the vote when listed first than when listed in any other position. In seven of those 71 contests the advantage to first position exceeded the winner's margin of victory, suggesting that ballot position would have determined the election outcomes if one candidate had held the top spot in all precincts.
Immediate recall of nine-digit lists was examined with a method designed to disentangle three factors: input serial position, output position, and response set size (the number of items yet to be recalled). Recall began at Input Serial Position 1, 4, or 7 and included either three consecutive items (in partial recall) or all items from the cued point to the end of the list and then continuing from the beginning in a circular fashion (in whole recall). Lists were spoken or printed and were sometimes temporally grouped. Specially selected comparisons demonstrated that (1) the large primacy effect in serial recall occurs mostly because of output interference, without which larger recency effects are seen instead; (2) benefits of mnemonic grouping are dependent on stimulus grouping mainly for auditory stimuli; and (3) auditory superiority effects stem from a greater resistance of acoustic memory to output interference. We offer an integration of results from serial recall and other memory tasks and caution against modeling serial recall in isolation.
This monumental study is a comprehensive critical survey of the policy preferences of the American public, and will be the definitive work on American public opinion for some time to come. Drawing on an enormous body of public opinion data, Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro provide the richest available portrait of the political views of Americans, from the 1930's to 1990. They not only cover all types of domestic and foreign policy issues, but also consider how opinions vary by age, gender, race, region, and the like. The authors unequivocally demonstrate that, notwithstanding fluctuations in the opinions of individuals, collective public opinion is remarkably coherent: it reflects a stable system of values shared by the majority of Americans and it responds sensitively to new events, arguments, and information reported in the mass media. While documenting some alarming case of manipulation, Page and Shapiro solidly establish the soundness and value of collective political opinion. The Rational Public provides a wealth of information about what we as a nation have wanted from government, how we have changed our minds over the years, and why. For anyone interested in the short- and long-term trends in Americans' policy preferences, or eager to learn what Americans have thought about issues ranging from racial equality to the MX missile, welfare to abortion, this book offers by far the most sophisticated and detailed treatment available.
This monumental study is a comprehensive critical survey of the policy preferences of the American public, and will be the definitive work on American public opinion for some time to come. Drawing on an enormous body of public opinion data, Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro provide the richest available portrait of the political views of Americans, from the 1930's to 1990. They not only cover all types of domestic and foreign policy issues, but also consider how opinions vary by age, gender, race, region, and the like. The authors unequivocally demonstrate that, notwithstanding fluctuations in the opinions of individuals, collective public opinion is remarkably coherent: it reflects a stable system of values shared by the majority of Americans and it responds sensitively to new events, arguments, and information reported in the mass media. While documenting some alarming case of manipulation, Page and Shapiro solidly establish the soundness and value of collective political opinion. The Rational Public provides a wealth of information about what we as a nation have wanted from government, how we have changed our minds over the years, and why. For anyone interested in the short- and long-term trends in Americans' policy preferences, or eager to learn what Americans have thought about issues ranging from racial equality to the MX missile, welfare to abortion, this book offers by far the most sophisticated and detailed treatment available.
The Reasoning Voter is an insider's look at campaigns, candidates, media, and voters that convincingly argues that voters make informed logical choices. Samuel L. Popkin analyzes three primary campaignsâCarter in 1976; Bush and Reagan in 1980; and Hart, Mondale, and Jackson in 1984âto arrive at a new model of the way voters sort through commercials and sound bites to choose a candidate. Drawing on insights from economics and cognitive psychology, he convincingly demonstrates that, as trivial as campaigns often appear, they provide voters with a surprising amount of information on a candidate's views and skills. For all their shortcomings, campaigns do matter. "Professor Popkin has brought V.O. Key's contention that voters are rational into the media age. This book is a useful rebuttal to the cynical view that politics is a wholly contrived business, in which unscrupulous operatives manipulate the emotions of distrustful but gullible citizens. The reality, he shows, is both more complex and more hopeful than that."âDavid S. Broder, The Washington Post
The use of the World Wide Web to conduct surveys has grown rapidly over the past decade, raising concerns regarding data quality,
questionnaire design, and sample representativeness. This research note focuses on an issue that has not yet been studied:
Are respondents who complete self-administered Web surveys more quickly—perhaps taking advantage of participation benefits
while minimizing effort—also more prone to response order effects, a manifestation of “satisficing”? I surveyed a random sample
of the US adult population over the Web and manipulated the order in which respondents saw the response options. I then assessed
whether primacy effects were moderated by the overall length of time respondents took to complete the questionnaires. I found
that low-education respondents who filled out the questionnaire most quickly were most prone to primacy effects when completing
items with unipolar rating scales. These results have important implications for various aspects of Web survey methodology
including panel management, human–computer interaction, and response order randomization.
Since the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, social scientists have rediscovered a long tradition of research that investigates the effects of ballot format on voting. Using a new dataset collected by the New York Times, we investigate the causal effect of being listed on the first ballot page in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. California law mandates a complex randomization procedure of ballot order that approximates a classical randomized experiment in a real world setting. The recall election also poses particular statistical challenges with an unprecedented 135 candidates running for the office. We apply (nonparametric) randomization inference based on Fisher's exact test, which incorporates the complex randomization procedure and yields accurate confidence intervals. Conventional asymptotic model-based inferences are found to be highly sensitive to assumptions and model specification. Randomization inference suggests that roughly half of the candidates gained more votes when listed on the first page of the ballot.
- Elisabeth Gidengil
- André Blais
- Neil Nevitte
- Richard Nadeau
Gidengil, Elisabeth, André Blais, Neil Nevitte and Richard Nadeau. 2004. Citizens.
Vancouver: UBC Press.