voting patterns drive PAC contributions

Do PACs give political contributions in an effort to "bribe" or otherwise convince politicians into voting in their favor? Or, do PACs give political contributions to the politicians that have underlying preferences consistent with the PACs positions (i.e., those politicians who would vote in favor of the PAC regardless of their contributions)?

In a recent NBER working paper, Dalton Conley and Brian McCabe (NYU) present some evidence that the later story might be correct, at least in some situations. First, they show that politicians are more likely to vote liberally on women's issues when they daughters. (This has been shown before.) Second, they show that this exogenous change in voting behavior has a significant impact on PAC contributions, suggesting that contributions follow from voting choices, not the other way around.

Read the paper here or here.

beauty and success in elections

In the February issue of the Journal of Public Economics, Niclas Berggren, Henrik Jordahl, and Panu Poutvaara present evidence that a political candidate's physical beauty affects voting in elections. Using data on 1929 Finnish political candidates, the researchers show that (from their abstract):

An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes fro the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.

good book -- why elections aren't fair

I recently read the book "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)" by William Poundstone. The non-academic book considers the design of voting system, and does a good job discussing the academic literature in the process. Included is Arrow's impossibility theorem (it's impossible to design a perfect set of voting rules), and discussing the possitives and negatives of plurality voting, proportional representation, range voting, instant runoff voting, condorcet voting, the bords count, and approval voting mechanisms. Poundstone makes the case that changing the voting mechanism in the US could eliminate the spoiler effect and other problems.

Amazon book site.

media exposure and voter behavior

Alan Gerber, Dean Karlan, and Daniel Bergan (Yale) conduct an interesting field experiment in which they give potential voters newspaper subscriptions, and analyze the impact of the subscriptions on voting behavior. Some voters received a subscription to the Washington Post (which tends to have left-leaning editorial pages), and some received a subscription to the Washington Times (and its more conservative editorial pages).

They find that exposure to the news resulted in greater Democratic candidate support, independent of the editorial leanings of the newspaper. News exposure also likely increased voter turnout. From their abstract:

We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. However, receiving either paper led to more support for the Democratic candidate, suggesting that media slant mattered less in this case than media exposure. Some evidence also suggests that receiving either paper led to increased 2006 voter turnout.

Read the article.

sticking with your vote

In a forthcoming article by Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard) and Ebonya Washington (Yale), the authors empirically test whether one's past voting behavior affects future political beliefs.

Acording to the psychological cognitive dissonance theory, people interpret evidence in ways that justify their own past actions. For example, suppose you voted for George W Bush in 2000. When updating your beliefs about W's performance, you may put more emphasis on positive pieces of information that justifies this past vote, and less emphasis on negative evidence that makes the past vote look bad. When thinking about the war in Iraq, for example, you may put more weight on the positive effects of the surge, rather than the negative effects of war in the first place.

To test this theory, Mullainathan and Washington compare the presidential opinion ratings of people who turned 18 in time to vote in the presidential election, with the opinion ratings of similar individuals who were not quite 18 in time to vote. Their results support the cognitive dissonance theory. From the abstract:

We examine the presidential opinion ratings of voting-age eligibles and ineligibles two years after the president’s election. We find that eligibles show two to three times greater polarization of opinions than comparable ineligibles. We find smaller effects when we compare polarization in opinions of senators elected during high turnout presidential campaign years with senators elected during nonpresidential campaign years.

Read the paper.

voting for Buchanan, when you ment to vote for Gore

Kelly Shue and Erzo Luttmer (both at Harvard) consider the role of "misvoting" in elections. Apparantly, not everyone is capable of going into the voting booth and casting a vote for the candidate they intend to support. The study uses data from the 2003 California recall election, in which there was "quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots." The authors show that "minor candidate's vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates."

This is evidence that voters routinely make mistakes when submitting their ballots. What's more, the authors find evidence that these mistakes are larger is precincts with more poorly educated and poor voters. Therefore, "a major candidate that disproportionally attracts voters from such [undereducation or poor] preceincts faces an electoral disadvantage."

The article is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Policy. Read the article.

what you should know about politics

Ok, so this isn't a research paper. It isn't even written by a Ph.D. academic. But it is a good book, and gives a well-balanced overview of the issues.

What you should know about politics... but don't

do political parties matter?

Does it matter if we elect a democrat or a republican to local office? If we elect a republican, will government be smaller? Do democrats allocate the budget differently than republicans? Which party is better at fighting crime? These are the questions asked in a careful analysis by Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko (both at the Wharton School). Their surprising result: the political party doesn't matter.

This result is in contrast to state and national politics, where the party matters. How to explain this difference? The authors suggest that it comes from the relative homogeneity of cities, which "appears to provide the proper incentives for local politicians to be able to credibly commit to moderation and discourages strategic extremism."

The paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the QJE. Download it here (or here).

women's suffrage and child health

Are women more concerned than men about the wellbeing of children? If that is true--or if politicians perceive it to be true--then increasing female participation in politics could lead to more policies that benefit children. Grant Miller (Stanford) tests this hypothesis in a new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He finds evidence suggesting that giving women the right to vote led to higher child wellbeing. From the paper abstract:

...Suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. ... Suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8–15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide)...

Read the article