Inflation in 2022 did not affect congressional voting, but abortion did.

This study examines voting in the 2022 United States congressional elections, contests that were widely expected to produce a sizable defeat for Democratic candidates for largely economic reasons. Based on a representative national probability sample of voters interviewed in both 2020 and 2022, individuals who changed their vote from one party's congressional candidate to another party's candidate did not do so in response to the salience of inflation or declining economic conditions. Instead, we find strong evidence that views on abortion were central to shifting votes in the midterm elections. Americans who favored (opposed) legal abortions were more likely to shift from voting for Republican (Democratic) candidates in 2020 to Democratic (Republican) candidates in 2022. Since a larger number of Americans supported than opposed legal abortions, the combination of these shifts ultimately improved the electoral prospects of Democratic candidates. New voters were especially likely to weigh abortion views heavily in their vote-shifting calculus. Likewise, those respondents whose confidence in the US Supreme Court declined from 2020 to 2022 were more likely to shift from voting for Republican to Democratic congressional candidates. We provide direct empirical evidence that changes in support for the Supreme Court, a nonpartisan branch of the federal government, are implicated in partisan voting behavior in another branch of government. We explore the implications of these findings for prevalent assumptions about how economic conditions influence voting, as well as for the relationship between the judiciary and electoral politics.

Who benefits from voter identification laws?

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, many American state governments implemented voter identification (ID) laws for elections held in their states. These laws, which commonly mandate photo ID and/or require significant effort by voters lacking ID, sparked an ongoing national debate over the tension between election security and access in a democratic society. The laws' proponents-primarily politicians in the Republican Party-claim that they prevent voter fraud, while Democratic opponents denounce the disproportionate burden they place on historically disadvantaged groups such as the poor and people of color. While these positions may reflect sincerely held beliefs, they also align with the political parties' rational electoral strategies because the groups most likely to be disenfranchised by the laws tend to support Democratic candidates. Are these partisan views on the impact of voter ID correct? Existing research focuses on how voter ID laws affect voter turnout and fraud. But the extent to which they produce observable electoral benefits for Republican candidates and/or penalize Democrats remains an open question. We examine how voter ID impacts the parties' electoral fortunes in races at the state level (state legislatures and governorships) and federal level (United States Congress and president) during 2003 to 2020. Our results suggest negligible average effects but with some heterogeneity over time. The first laws implemented produced a Democratic advantage, which weakened to near zero after 2012. We conclude that voter ID requirements motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.

Election cycles and global religious intolerance.

Mass elections are key mechanisms for collective decision-making. But they are also blamed for creating intergroup enmity, particularly while they are underway; politicians use polarizing campaign strategies, and losing sides feel resentful and marginalized after results are announced. I investigate the impact of election proximity-that is, closeness to elections in time-on social cleavages related to religion, a salient form of group identity worldwide. Integrating data from ∼1.2 million respondents across 25 cross-country survey series, I find no evidence that people interviewed shortly before or after national elections are more likely to express negative attitudes toward religious outgroups than those interviewed at other times. Subgroup analysis reveals little heterogeneity, including by levels of political competition. Generalized social trust, too, is unaffected by election calendars. Elections may not pose as great a risk to social cohesion as is commonly feared.

Dark defaults: How choice architecture steers political campaign donations.

In the months before the 2020 U.S. election, several political campaign websites added prechecked boxes (defaults), automatically making all donations into recurring weekly contributions unless donors unchecked them. Since these changes occurred at different times for different campaigns, we use a staggered difference-in-differences design to measure the causal effects of defaults on donors' behavior. We estimate that defaults increased campaign donations by over $43 million while increasing requested refunds by almost $3 million. The weekly default only impacted weekly recurring donations, and not other donations, suggesting that donors may not have intended to make weekly donations. The longer defaults were displayed, the more money campaigns raised through weekly donations. Donors did not compensate by changing the amount they donated. We found that the default had a larger impact on smaller donors and on donors who had no prior experience with defaults, causing them to start more chains and donate a larger proportion of their money through weekly recurring donations.

Part of the gender gap in voting for Democrats arises because a higher proportion of women than men voters are Black.

Women voted for the Democratic candidate more than men did in each US presidential election since 1980. We show that part of the gender gap stems from the fact that a higher proportion of women than men voters are Black, and Black voters overwhelmingly choose Democratic candidates. Past research shows that Black men have especially high rates of death, incarceration, and disenfranchisement due to criminal convictions. These disparities reduce the share of men voters who are Black. We show that the gender difference in racial composition explains 24% of the gender gap in voting Democratic. The gender gap in voting Democratic is especially large among those who are never-married, and, among them, the differing racial composition of men and women voters is more impactful than in the population at large, explaining 43% of the gender gap. We consider an alternative hypothesis that income differences between single men and women explain the gender gap in voting, but our analysis leads us to reject it. Although unmarried women are poorer than unmarried men, and lower-income voters vote slightly more Democratic, the latter difference is too small for income to explain much of the gender gap in voting. In short, the large gender gap among unmarried voters is not a reflection of the lower incomes of women's households but does reflect the fact that women voters are disproportionately Black. We used the General Social Survey as the data source for the analysis, then replicated results with the American National Election Survey data.

Widespread partisan gerrymandering mostly cancels nationally, but reduces electoral competition.

Congressional district lines in many US states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting rules, we compare possible party compositions of the US House under the enacted plan to those under a set of alternative simulated plans that serve as a nonpartisan baseline. We find that partisan gerrymandering is widespread in the 2020 redistricting cycle, but most of the electoral bias it creates cancels at the national level, giving Republicans two additional seats on average. Geography and redistricting rules separately contribute a moderate pro-Republican bias. Finally, we find that partisan gerrymandering reduces electoral competition and makes the partisan composition of the US House less responsive to shifts in the national vote.

Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election.

Following the 2020 general election, Republican elected officials, including then-President Donald Trump, promoted conspiracy theories claiming that Joe Biden's close victory in Georgia was fraudulent. Such conspiratorial claims could implicate participation in the Georgia Senate runoff election in different ways-signaling that voting doesn't matter, distracting from ongoing campaigns, stoking political anger at out-partisans, or providing rationalizations for (lack of) enthusiasm for voting during a transfer of power. Here, we evaluate the possibility of any on-average relationship with turnout by combining behavioral measures of engagement with election conspiracies online and administrative data on voter turnout for 40,000 Twitter users registered to vote in Georgia. We find small, limited associations. Liking or sharing messages opposed to conspiracy theories was associated with higher turnout than expected in the runoff election, and those who liked or shared tweets promoting fraud-related conspiracy theories were slightly less likely to vote.

Americans discount the effect of friction on voter turnout.

Whether or not someone turns out to vote depends on their beliefs (such as partisanship or sense of civic duty) and on friction-external barriers such as long travel distance to the polls. In this exploratory study, we tested whether people underestimate the effect of friction on turnout and overestimate the effect of beliefs. We surveyed a representative sample of eligible US voters before and after the 2020 election (n = 1,280). Participants' perceptions consistently underemphasized friction and overemphasized beliefs (mean d = 0.94). In participants' open-text explanations, 91% of participants listed beliefs, compared with just 12% that listed friction. In contrast, turnout was shaped by beliefs only slightly more than friction. The actual belief-friction difference was about one-fourth the size of participants' perceptions (d = 0.24). This bias emerged across a range of survey measures (open- and close-ended; other- and self-judgments) and was implicated in downstream consequences such as support for friction-imposing policies and failing to plan one's vote.

Elite rhetoric can undermine democratic norms.

Democratic stability depends on citizens on the losing side accepting election outcomes. Can rhetoric by political leaders undermine this norm? Using a panel survey experiment, we evaluate the effects of exposure to multiple statements from former president Donald Trump attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 US presidential election. Although exposure to these statements does not measurably affect general support for political violence or belief in democracy, it erodes trust and confidence in elections and increases belief that the election is rigged among people who approve of Trump's job performance. These results suggest that rhetoric from political elites can undermine respect for critical democratic norms among their supporters.

Men and women candidates are similarly persistent after losing elections.

Are women more likely to quit politics after losing their first race than men? Women's first-time candidacies skyrocketed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Yet we have little sense of the long-term impact of this surge in women candidates on women's representation writ large: Inexperienced candidates are more likely to lose, and women might be especially discouraged by a loss. This might make the benefits of such a surge in candidacies fleeting. Using a regression discontinuity design and data that feature 212,805 candidates across 22,473 jurisdictions between 1950 and 2018, we find that women who narrowly lose these elections are no more likely to quit politics than men who narrowly lose. Drawing on scholarship on women's lower political ambition, we interpret these findings to mean that women's decision-making differs from men's at the point of entry into politics-not at the point of reentry.

Results from a 2020 field experiment encouraging voting by mail.

The ability to cast a mail ballot can safeguard the franchise. However, because there are often additional procedural protections to ensure that a ballot cast in person counts, voting by mail can also jeopardize people's ability to cast a recorded vote. An experiment carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates both forces. Philadelphia officials randomly sent 46,960 Philadelphia registrants postcards encouraging them to apply to vote by mail in the lead-up to the June 2020 primary election. While the intervention increased the likelihood a registrant cast a mail ballot by 0.4 percentage points (P = 0.017)-or 3%-many of these additional mail ballots counted only because a last-minute policy intervention allowed most mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to count.

Does gender affect environmentally virtuous behaviour? Evidence from selective waste collection.

This research analyses the issue, unexplored to date, of the causal relationship between women politicians and selective waste collection. Differing attitudes towards environmental issues between men and women may affect waste management at the municipal level, so an increase in women's political representation can be expected to enhance the effectiveness of selective waste collection. The analysis tests for this in Italy, exploiting a gender quota measure (Law 215/2012) as an exogenous shock to the percentage of female municipal councilors. Difference-in-differences instrumental variable analysis finds that an increase of one standard deviation in the percentage of female councilors increases the percentage of selective waste collection by 2.18 percentage points and the total tonnage of selective waste by 447.86. At the same time it reduces the amount of non-selective waste collection by 491.22 tonnes. The study comprises a number of sensitivity analyses for different model specifications, different definitions of dependent variables, different size of municipalities and different geographical areas.

Understanding Support for Municipal Political Parties: Evidence from Canada.

The province of Ontario, Canada, has a longstanding history of non-partisanship in municipal elections. In this distinctive context, we report results on citizen attitudes toward municipal partisanship using a survey of eligible voters in Canada's most populous province. Using a mixed-methods approach, we focus on three interrelated research questions. First, how much does citizen support for municipal parties depend on the type of party under consideration? Second, what reasons do citizens provide for their preference for either municipal political parties or independents? Finally, what are the correlates of support for municipal parties? We find little support for municipal political parties, and that many voters have sophisticated reasons for preferring either independents or parties. We also identify several factors associated with support for parties. These results provide an in-depth picture of attitudes on municipal partisanship in Ontario, and suggest that public opinion may provide an overlooked mechanism that maintains Ontario's non-partisanship.

Opinion Models, Election Data, and Political Theory.

A unifying setup for opinion models originating in statistical physics and stochastic opinion dynamics are developed and used to analyze election data. The results are interpreted in the light of political theory. We investigate the connection between Potts (Curie-Weiss) models and stochastic opinion models in the view of the Boltzmann distribution and stochastic Glauber dynamics. We particularly find that the q-voter model can be considered as a natural extension of the Zealot model, which is adapted by Lagrangian parameters. We also discuss weak and strong effects (also called extensive and nonextensive) continuum limits for the models. The results are used to compare the Curie-Weiss model, two q-voter models (weak and strong effects), and a reinforcement model (weak effects) in explaining electoral outcomes in four western democracies (United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany). We find that particularly the weak effects models are able to fit the data (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test) where the weak effects reinforcement model performs best (AIC). Additionally, we show how the institutional structure shapes the process of opinion formation. By focusing on the dynamics of opinion formation preceding the act of voting, the models discussed in this paper give insights both into the empirical explanation of elections as such, as well as important aspects of the theory of democracy. Therefore, this paper shows the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach in studying real world political outcomes by using mathematical models.

The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies.

We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election outcomes across countries and time. We find that the cleavage has widened over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of urban-rural cleavages.

Electoral Democracy and Working-Age Mortality.

Policy Points The erosion of electoral democracy in the United States in recent decades may have contributed to the high and rising working-age mortality rates, which predate the COVID-19 pandemic. Eroding electoral democracy in a US state was associated with higher working-age mortality from homicide, suicide, and especially from drug poisoning and infectious disease. State and federal efforts to strengthen electoral democracy, such as banning partisan gerrymandering, improving voter enfranchisement, and reforming campaign finance laws, could potentially avert thousands of deaths each year among working-age adults. CONTEXT: Working-age mortality rates are high and rising in the United States, an alarming fact that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Although several reasons for the high and rising rates have been hypothesized, the potential role of democratic erosion has been overlooked. This study examined the association between electoral democracy and working-age mortality and assessed how economic, behavioral, and social factors may have contributed to it. METHODS: We used the State Democracy Index (SDI), an annual summary of each state's electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018. We merged the SDI with annual age-adjusted mortality rates for adults 25-64 years in each state. Models estimated the association between the SDI and working-age mortality (from all causes and six specific causes) within states, adjusting for political party control, safety net generosity, union coverage, immigrant population, and stable characteristics of states. We assessed whether economic (income, unemployment), behavioral (alcohol consumption, sleep), and social (marriage, violent crime, incarceration) factors accounted for the association. FINDINGS: Increasing electoral democracy in a state from a moderate level (defined as the third quintile of the SDI distribution) to a high level (defined as the fifth quintile) was associated with an estimated 3.2% and 2.7% lower mortality rate among working-age men and women, respectively, over the next year. Increasing electoral democracy in all states from the third to the fifth quintile of the SDI distribution may have resulted in 20,408 fewer working-age deaths in 2019. The democracy-mortality association mainly reflected social factors and, to a lesser extent, health behaviors. Increasing electoral democracy in a state was mostly strongly associated with lower mortality from drug poisoning and infectious diseases, followed by reductions in homicide and suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Erosion of electoral democracy is a threat to population health. This study adds to growing evidence that electoral democracy and population health are inextricably linked.

Promoting data harmonization to evaluate vaccine hesitancy in LMICs: approach and applications.

BACKGROUND: Factors influencing the health of populations are subjects of interdisciplinary study. However, datasets relevant to public health often lack interdisciplinary breath. It is difficult to combine data on health outcomes with datasets on potentially important contextual factors, like political violence or development, due to incompatible levels of geographic support; differing data formats and structures; differences in sampling procedures and wording; and the stability of temporal trends. We present a computational package to combine spatially misaligned datasets, and provide an illustrative analysis of multi-dimensional factors in health outcomes. METHODS: We rely on a new software toolkit, Sub-National Geospatial Data Archive (SUNGEO), to combine data across disciplinary domains and demonstrate a use case on vaccine hesitancy in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). We use data from the World Bank's High Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS) from Kenya, Indonesia, and Malawi. We curate and combine these surveys with data on political violence, elections, economic development, and other contextual factors, using SUNGEO. We then develop a stochastic model to analyze the integrated data and evaluate 1) the stability of vaccination preferences in all three countries over time, and 2) the association between local contextual factors and vaccination preferences. RESULTS: In all three countries, vaccine-acceptance is more persistent than vaccine-hesitancy from round to round: the long-run probability of staying vaccine-acceptant (hesitant) was 0.96 (0.65) in Indonesia, 0.89 (0.21) in Kenya, and 0.76 (0.40) in Malawi. However, vaccine acceptance was significantly less durable in areas exposed to political violence, with percentage point differences (ppd) in vaccine acceptance of -10 (Indonesia), -5 (Kenya), and -64 (Malawi). In Indonesia and Kenya, although not Malawi, vaccine acceptance was also significantly less durable in locations without competitive elections (-19 and -6 ppd, respectively) and in locations with more limited transportation infrastructure (-11 and -8 ppd). CONCLUSION: With SUNGEO, researchers can combine spatially misaligned and incompatible datasets. As an illustrative example, we find that vaccination hesitancy is correlated with political violence, electoral uncompetitiveness and limited access to public goods, consistent with past results that vaccination hesitancy is associated with government distrust.

Electoral College bias and the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump's 2016 win despite failing to carry the popular vote has raised concern that 2020 would also see a mismatch between the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the Electoral College. This paper shows how to forecast the electoral vote in 2020 taking into account the unknown popular vote and the configuration of state voting in 2016. We note that 2016 was a statistical outlier. The potential Electoral College bias was slimmer in the past and not always favoring the Republican candidate. We show that in past presidential elections, difference among states in their presidential voting is solely a function of the states' most recent presidential voting (plus new shocks); earlier history does not matter. Based on thousands of simulations, our research suggests that the bias in 2020 probably will favor Trump again but to a lesser degree than in 2016. The range of possible outcomes is sufficiently wide, however, to even include some possibility that Joseph Biden could win in the Electoral College while barely losing the popular vote.

America's electorate is increasingly polarized along partisan lines about voting by mail during the COVID-19 crisis.

Are voters as polarized as political leaders when it comes to their preferences about how to cast their ballots in November 2020 and their policy positions on how elections should be run in light of the COVID-19 outbreak? Prior research has shown little party divide on voting by mail, with nearly equal percentages of voters in both parties choosing to vote this way where it is an option. Has a divide opened up this year in how voters aligned with the Democratic and Republican parties prefer to cast a ballot? We address these questions with two nationally diverse, online surveys fielded from April 8 to 10 and June 11 to 13, of 5,612 and 5,818 eligible voters, respectively, with an embedded experiment providing treated respondents with scientific projections about the COVID-19 outbreak. We find a nearly 10 percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans in their preference for voting by mail in April, which had doubled in size to nearly 20 percentage points in June. This partisan gap is wider still for those exposed to scientific projections about the pandemic. We also find that support for national legislation requiring states to offer no-excuse absentee ballots has emerged as an increasingly polarized issue.

Sociopolitical stress and acute cardiovascular disease hospitalizations around the 2016 presidential election.

Previous research suggests that stressors may trigger the onset of acute cardiovascular disease (CVD) events within hours to days, but there has been limited research around sociopolitical events such as presidential elections. Among adults ≥18 y of age in Kaiser Permanente Southern California, hospitalization rates for acute CVD were compared in the time period immediately prior to and following the 2016 presidential election date. Hospitalization for CVD was defined as an inpatient or emergency department discharge diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or stroke using International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision codes. Rate ratios (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated comparing CVD rates in the 2 d following the 2016 election to rates in the same 2 d of the prior week. In a secondary analysis, AMI and stroke were analyzed separately. The rate of CVD events in the 2 d after the 2016 presidential election (573.14 per 100,000 person-years [PY]) compared to the rate in the window prior to the 2016 election (353.75 per 100,000 PY) was 1.62 times higher (95% CI 1.17, 2.25). Results were similar across sex, age, and race/ethnicity groups. The RRs were similar for AMI (RR 1.67, 95% CI 1.00, 2.76) and stroke (RR 1.59, 95% CI 1.03, 2.44) separately. Transiently heightened cardiovascular risk around the 2016 election may be attributable to sociopolitical stress. Further research is needed to understand the intersection between major sociopolitical events, perceived stress, and acute CVD events.