Chicago
Now that Labor Day has passed, the U.S. election season has officially begun. For the next eight weeks, candidates and voters will gaze at one another in a state of anxiety and mutual incomprehension. Voters will ask themselves: Why do candidates spend so much time hammering the same messages into the ground? Why do they keep smiling those awkward smiles? And campaign managers will wonder, as they lie awake at night: Why are voters so ignorant, fickle, and difficult to mobilize?
A few tentative answers were offered here this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Scholars in the association’s elections-and-voting-behavior division presented evidence about the institutional constraints and psychological mechanisms that lead campaigns and voters to act as they do. Their findings might help explain this season’s electoral dance.
The Trouble With Turnout
Several papers concerned the emergence of “early voting” in the United States. Twenty-six states now allow voters to file absentee ballots without offering an excuse such as illness or travel. Some states -- most notably Texas -- have also established systems in which people can vote in person at a county office or library weeks before Election Day. And in 1998, Oregon moved entirely to a vote-by-mail process, in which all registered voters receive ballots in the mail in late October. The overall proportion of early votes is expected to rise sharply in this year’s presidential election.
One effect of all this is that campaigns are likely to become even more expensive, according to a study presented by Paul Gronke, an associate professor of political science at Reed College. Mr. Gronke offered anecdotal evidence that candidates and their handlers dislike the new systems, because campaigns feel compelled to spend money over a longer period of time, and because, in most cases, they are less sure whom to target during the final week of the campaign.
There is fairly strong evidence, for example, that early voters tend to be highly partisan. In the Oregon system, the remaining “nonvoters” in the campaign’s final days are relatively young and nonpartisan, and campaigns are uncertain about how to speak to this group.
Mr. Gronke and others also said that contrary to reformers’ hopes, early-voting systems do not seem to increase turnout. At best, the Oregon system makes people who were already fairly regular voters more likely to vote in minor, off-year elections.
Michael J. Hanmer, of Georgetown University, offered further bad news: “Same-day registration” systems, in which people need not register before Election Day, do not boost turnout as much as political scientists had once believed. The earlier optimism, Mr. Hanmer said, was based on the adoption of same-day registration in the 1970s in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin, which already had cultures of high political participation. States that adopted the system more recently have seen much weaker gains, he said.
The Nader Effect
On another front, two scholars offered new fodder for one of the great barstool debates of the past four years: Exactly how much did Ralph Nader’s campaign damage Al Gore’s position in Florida in 2000? Michael C. Herron, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, and Jeffrey B. Lewis, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, estimated that 61 percent of Nader voters in Florida would have voted for Mr. Gore had Mr. Nader not been in the race.
Mr. Nader’s votes did indeed spoil the race for Mr. Gore, because the Florida race was extremely close -- but Mr. Nader’s supporters were not overwhelmingly liberal Democrats, as many commentators have assumed. “The key thing about 61 is that it’s a lot closer to 50 than it is to 100,” Mr. Herron said.
Mr. Herron and Mr. Lewis based their conclusion of a study of more than three million images of actual ballots from the 2000 election in 10 Florida counties. The two scholars have analyzed “down ballot” votes -- that is, the choices that people who voted for Mr. Nader or Pat Buchanan for president made in races further down the ballot, such as those for the U.S. Senate, the state Legislature, and local offices. From those down-ballot choices, Mr. Herron and Mr. Lewis made inferences about the voters’ partisan preferences. In Broward County, for example, they found that only 18.36 percent of people who voted for Mr. Nader for president voted a straight Democratic ticket on the rest on the ballot.
Mr. Herron and Mr. Lewis weighted the down-ballot races in various ways, to give preference to races that were most likely to reveal a true partisan preference. If, for example, a person voted for a popular incumbent state legislator who faced only token opposition, that vote was not necessarily a strong signal of partisan preference. How that person voted in a tightly contested race was a much stronger signal of general political or ideological preference.
Mr. Herron said that his huge trove of Florida data offers much more reliable insight than typical studies of third-party voters, which have tried to draw inferences from tiny numbers of people in exit polls. Perhaps the most dismaying element of his study is that he discovered a large cohort of people who voted for Mr. Buchanan but whose down-ballot votes suggested that they were partisan Democrats. Those voters were residents of Palm Beach County, the home of the notoriously confusing butterfly ballot.
To Vote or Not to Vote
One scholar looked at a more fundamental question: Why vote at all? The odds that one’s vote will tip the balance in an electoral contest are infinitesimally small, so why does anyone expend the effort to go down to the polls and do the deed?
Scholars who work within a rational-choice framework -- the strict cost-benefit analysis pioneered by academic economists -- have long found that question a puzzle. Their explorations of this topic have often been scorned by scholars in other subfields of political science, who believe that people’s reasons for voting can’t be reduced to a narrow calculus of personal costs and benefits.
At the conference, however, James H. Fowler, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Davis, proposed a solution that he believes can account for voting behavior within the framework of rational choice. His solution: Altruistic people are more likely to vote.
Mr. Fowler recruited 249 students to pay the “dictator game,” a laboratory technique pioneered by experimental economists. In the dictator game, a player is surprised with a gift of a certain amount of money, and then asked if he would like to share a fraction of the money with an anonymous stranger. Typically, 20 percent to 35 percent of the players choose to keep all of the money for themselves, while the majority choose to give at least a small part of their bounty to the stranger.
Mr. Fowler found that participants who behaved altruistically in the dictator game and who also identified strongly with a political party -- suggesting that they probably believe that their vote helps others -- were more likely than their egoistic and/or nonpartisan peers to report having voted in the March 2004 primary elections in California. If you believe that your vote might bring large benefits to many people, Mr. Fowler said, then your Election Day calculus might make it seem worthwhile to trudge to the polls, despite the tiny odds that your vote will actually be decisive.
Background article from The Chronicle:
