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Comments on the papers by Theodore Keeler and Barry Weingast about the changes in the U.S. regulatory process. Highlights of Keeler's paper; Information on Weingast's paper; Factor that drives the voter and interest groups to support new views through the electoral process.

The article discusses electronic voting machines, particularly the direct recording electronic (DRE) devices. The device translates a voter's choice into electronic data. Computer scientists Avi Rubin and Dan Wallach recommended that DRE systems should generate voter-verified audit trails on which a voter could check that his or her vote had been cast correctly. The DRE system was put in place in the May 2006 primary elections in Ohio. However, it was not a great success and a Ohio study showed that almost 10% of the paper records were useless or absent because the printers jammed, ran out of paper or overprinted.

This paper compares two measures of House election outcomes: return rates and vote share for presidential party incumbents. It is found that these election variables move independently from each other. The empirical work discovers that the relationship between return rates and vote share varies as vote share increases and as time progresses. It reports that economic variables explain movement in return rates independent of vote share, but economic variables cannot explain variation in vote share independent of return rates. These results suggest return rates are more sensitive to economic fluctuations than vote share. This paper also finds that the magnitude of the response to changes in economic variables differs across these two election result terms. (JEL D72) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An earlier paper showed a negative relation between increases and accelerations in F, the ratio of federal expenditures to GNP and E, the reelection or defeat of the incumbent party in the White House over the last 100 years. This paper argues that there also exists a negative relation between V, the percentage of the popular vote cast for the incumbents, and F. This function is displaced by wars and depressions and can drift over time, making it difficult to discover negative curves in the data. Dividing British and US data for the last 50 years into party periods yields clearly discernable negative functions for F and V for the incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new approach to spatial models of legislative elections in which voters have preferences over the bundles of roll call votes implied by candidate locations rather than over the locations themselves. With such preferences, voters with single-peaked, symmetric preferences and perfect information can sincerely prefer a distant candidate to a more proximate candidate. Moreover, negative agenda control in Congress makes such preference orderings inevitable, so party agenda control can allow majority party extremists to defeat more centrist minority party candidates. The model has implications for theories of parties in Congress, and spatial modeling more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the relationship between the quantity of information that voters possess and their party voting behavior in partisan elections has produced mixed and confusing empirical results. In an effort to provide a broader perspective, this paper explores that relationship in nonpartisan elections contested by candidates of opposing parties. The paper analyzes survey data on two 1984 contests for seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, using the presidential race for comparison. Despite a highly partisan campaign, party defections by voters were far more common in the supreme court races than in the presidential race, reflecting the importance of party designations on the ballot as a source of information on candidates' party affiliations. At the individual level, levels of information had differing effects in the two supreme court races and for Democratic and Republican voters; this finding suggests that the impact of information levels on voters' choices is conditioned by the content of information in particular campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why fight secession? This paper is a case study on this question, asking why the North chose to fight the South in the American Civil War. It tests a theoretical prediction that economic motivations were important, using county-level presidential election data. If economic interests like manufacturing wished to keep the Union together, they should have generated votes to do so. That prediction is borne out by the data, and explanations other than Northern economic concerns about Southern secession appear unable to explain the results, suggesting that economic motivations were important to support for fighting the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many factors influence the likelihood of citizens turning out to vote. In this paper we focus our attention on issue voting, that is, on the likelihood that different policies offered by politicians affect the probability of voting. If voters consider both the benefits and the costs of voting, rational voters will only vote when politicians offer differentiated policies. In a multidimensional policy space this implies that citizens only vote when they perceive enough difference on the issues they care about the most. We investigate the role of voter abstention due to indifference in a unidimensional and a multidimensional policy setting using data from the US National Election Studies for 1972-2000 and find support for our predictions: voters perceiving a small difference between the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties are less likely to vote; and voters who perceive the two parties as more different on a larger number of issues are significantly more likely to vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The timing of message delivery in political campaigns is a key component of strategy. Yet studies that examine the impact of message timing on political behavior are surprisingly rare. Although one recent study finds that appeals delivered closer to Election Day will be most effective (Nickerson, American Journal of Political Science 51(2):269-282, ), methodological considerations render this conclusion tentative and suggest the impact of message timing remains an open question. In this paper I report the results of a randomized field experiment designed to compare the mobilization effects of nonpartisan messages delivered via commercial phone banks at different points during a campaign cycle. The results of the experiment, conducted during the November 2005 municipal elections in Rochester, New York, suggest calls delivered early on during a campaign cycle can also be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substantial influence of candidate issue contrast. Further, I find that leading hypotheses for the 'resurgence in partisanship' are not consistent with some important facts suggesting that the explanation remains elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

an institution, the American news media have become highly unpopular in recent decades. Yet, we do not thoroughly understand the consequences of this unpopularity for mass political behavior. While several existing studies find that media trust moderates media effects, they do not examine the consequences of this for voting. This paper explores those consequences by analyzing voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election. It finds, consistent with most theories of persuasion and with studies of media effects in other contexts, that media distrust leads voters to discount campaign news and increasingly rely on their partisan predispositions as cues. This suggests that increasing aggregate levels of media distrust are an important source of greater partisan voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data for the 50 US states for presidential elections from 1972 to 2004 two theories for determining state voting outcomes are considered jointly: the ‘economy matters’ and ‘home grown-ness’ theories. Fixed-effects regressions show that measures of the ‘economy matters’ (real income, unemployment and a proxy for inflation) have the predicted effects on state voting patterns for presidential elections. The home grown theory receives mixed support. There is weak evidence that incumbent-party candidates garner greater support in their home states. There is strong support, however, for the proposition that incumbent-party candidates fare worse in the home state of rival-party candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring the effect of ballot access restrictions on electoral competition is complicated because the stringency of ballot access regulations cannot be treated as being exogenous to candidates’ entry decisions. This paper exploits the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down Ohio’s ballot access law as a natural experiment to overcome the endogeneity problem. The evidence from difference-in-difference estimations suggests that the court’s decision and the accompanying sharp decrease in Ohio’s petition requirements resulted in major parties facing a significant increase in competition from third party and independent candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider several ways in which voting systems can be manipulated and we pose some related ethical questions. Our focus is on the recent phenomenon of vote trading or vote swapping that was invented in 2000 and used in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential elections. Vote trading is an Internet-based technique that sought to allow Democrats in heavily Republican states (like Texas) to effectively vote in swing states (like Florida), where their votes would have more impact. We also look at some other new ways that voting systems can be manipulated and we consider the general question of whether there exist voting systems that cannot be manipulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality election would win an ensuing runoff. Statistical models of voter behavior are developed that estimate this probability, which are verified with runoff-election data from United States elections. The models allow governments to make more informed choices in creating rules to decide when to hold runoff elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an econometric model to analyze the political and economic factors affecting the Senate voting patterns on the 1993 Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban. Results of a logit estimation procedure support the hypothesis that the political activities and presence of the National Rifle Association (measured as relative campaign contributions and membership) had a significant impact on the voting patterns by Senators on both bills. (JEL D72, Z10) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a graphical model to explain the relationship between majority voting and government growth in the U.S. Total government expenditure and GNP from 1929 to 1982; Assumption that government sets agendas to maximize expenditure; Numerical example of migration between two jurisdictions.

In previous work I have developed an equation explaining votes for president in the United States that seems to have remarkable explanatory power. In this paper the equation is updated through the 1984 election and then used to predict the 1988 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the effect of disgruntlement among those primary voters who supported U.S. presidential nomination losers. It analyzes the general election voting behavior of primary voters in the last five presidential elections in order to determine if differences exist between those supporters of the winning nominee in each party and backers of other candidates who also sought the nomination. A multivariate analysis of the determinants of voter turnout shows significant results only for the Democrats in 1972, when primary voters who supported candidates other than George McGovern were more likely to abstain in the general election. Taking into account the option of defecting to another party in November, both parties appear to have been plagued by a considerable amount of disloyalty on the part of supporters of candidates who failed to win the nomination, although for the Republicans this type of response is confined to the 1980 election. The existence of a third party or independent candidacy may be an important variable influencing the behavior of these disgruntled primary voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depending on their state of residence, Americans can participate in Presidential nomination contests either by voting in a primary or by attending a caucus. Since caucus participation requires more time and effort than primary voting, it has long been thought that caucuses must attract a more partisan, activist, and politically extreme cohort of citizens than primaries. This paper challenges the view that more burdensome electoral institutions necessarily ought to attract more politically engaged citizens. I propose a theory of peripheral motivations that predicts caucus goers and primary voters will not differ in terms of their political attitudes or interest, but they will differ in their levels of community engagement. The key insight is that many of the reasons why citizens choose to participate or abstain from politics actually have little to do with politics. Analysis of two surveys from the 2008 Presidential election substantiates the theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the sources of the widely available standard figures for Jewish voting in American presidential elections, which have previously been only vaguely identified. The pre-polling results for 1916-1932 data turn out to be only for Manhattan, and do not take sufficient account of voting patterns in other cities and of voting for the Socialist Party. The standard figures for the 1936-1968 period do not generally correspond to national surveys taken for those elections. The figures starting in 1972 are based on one set of exit polls, but should instead combine all of the exit polls. The 1924, 1952, and 1984 data are given particular attention because the Jewish vote was thought to be realigning in those years. Revised estimates find large differences for 1924 and 1948 and provide a firmer basis for tracing trends in Jewish voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divided government is known to correlate with limited government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper estimates the determinants of continuous and categorical measures of divided government in an empirical macro political economy model using 30 years of data from the American states. Voters support more divided government after increased government spending per dollar of tax revenues, but more unified government after worsening incomes and unemployment rates. Only conditional support is found for the strategic-moderating theory (Alesina and Rosenthal in Econometrica 64(6):1311-1341, ) that focuses purely on midterm cycles and split-ticket voting absent economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using panel data for 188 countries over the 1970-2008 period, this paper analyzes empirically the influence of the IMF and the World Bank on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. Countries receiving adjustment projects and larger non-concessional loans from the World Bank vote more frequently in line with the average G7 country. The same is true for countries obtaining non-concessional IMF programs. Regarding voting coincidence with the United States, World Bank non-concessional loans have a significant impact, while IMF loans do not. This overall pattern of results is robust to the choice of control variables and method of estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how the welfare of voters is affected under an Electoral College system when some state elects to award electoral votes in proportion to the number of votes received by each candidate rather than awarding all electoral votes to the winner of the state. I show that a majority of voters in that state is made worse off as a result of the change. I also give conditions under which voters in other states are made better or worse off as a result of the change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links campaign resources and voter calculus through a microeconomic optimization framework. I assume that candidate policy positions are fixed while personal valence scores and the salience of issue dimensions are malleable. Low valence candidates with many proximate competitors in the policy space will focus on building valence. High valence candidates who are relatively 'unclustered' in the policy space will focus on manipulating issue salience. Resources devoted to diminishing others' valence scores will increase as the number of viable candidates decreases. The model's results are tested, where feasible, using data from the Democratic Party primary of 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The union voting intention literature shows that many nonunion employees who indicate that they think unions are instrumental in increasing wages, benefits, and working conditions would vote against forming a union. Although American workers have often been characterized as pragmatic with regard to their support for unions, the "disconnect" between union beliefs and union voting intentions just described suggests that more subtle forces are at work. In this paper, it is shown empirically that union instrumentality is a limited predictor of union voting intentions for a recent national cross-section of workers. Rather, more general feelings toward unions and employers are primary. These accounted for a large portion of the variance in union voting intentions, with general feelings towards unions by far the most critical predictor. A concluding section discusses whether the results may reflect changes in union power and changes in employee views of unions. Areas for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and political observers have suggested that television has "personalized" voting behavior in American presidential elections by encouraging citizens to cast ballots on the basis of candidate image and personality. Though an oft-heard assertion, little solid evidence exists that this is true, and the reinvigoration of partisanship and the persistence of ideological conflict suggest personalization may be less pervasive than supposed. In this paper, I use National Election Studies data to examine whether voters are more concerned with candidates' personal characteristics now than they were at the outset of the television era. I find, however, that voters are no more likely today to mention candidate personality as a reason for their vote choice than they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, while personality affects voting behavior, its influence on candidate choice is not significantly larger than it was a half-century ago. The results are not contingent on exposure to television or political awareness and are insensitive to different measures of perceptions of candidate image. The findings are consistent with the resurgence of partisan voting in American elections and suggest that some concerns about TV's effects on political judgment are exaggerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first empirical study of delegate voting behavior on issues of slavery at the U.S. Constitutional Convention. We analyze two categories of votes: those related to apportionment and those related to the regulation of the slave trade. Although it is widely believed that delegates voted consistent with the interests of their states on issues of slavery, we find that for votes on apportionment, the effect of state interests was enhanced by both the delegate’s personal interest and his religious background. For votes regulating the slave trade, state interests had a significant effect but only within specific regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using panel data for 143 countries over the period 1973–2002, this paper empirically analyzes the influence of US aid on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. We use disaggregated aid data to account for the fact that various forms of aid may differ in their ability to induce political support by recipients. We obtain strong evidence that US aid buys voting compliance in the Assembly. More specifically, our results suggest that general budget support and grants are the major aid categories by which recipients have been induced to vote in line with the United States. When replicating the analysis for other G7 donors, no comparable patterns emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economists and political scientists have offered a variety of explanations for why legislators might rationally choose to ignore the preferences of their constituents, political parties, and presidents. The broad conclusion of this literature is that there is an element of “shirking” in congressional voting. The objective of this paper is to suggest that the effects of shirking in congressional voting may have increased over time, largely in response to the raising of barriers to competition in congressional elections, thereby enabling legislators to vote their own preferences without fear of losing reelection. We use a quasi-experimental design that controls for the effects of party, region, electoral safety, presidential control of the White House, and constituency factors, in isolating the causal effects of barriers to entry on a continuous series of roll-calls regarding the raising of the debt limit between 1953 and 1992. We find that “shirking” in legislative voting on debt limit legislation is a post-1970s phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In general in an organisation whose system of governance involves weighted voting, a member's weight in terms of the number of votes and the formal power it represents differ. Power indices provide a means of analysing this difference. The paper uses new algorithms for computing power indices for large games. Three analyses are carried out: (1) the distribution of Banzhaf voting power among members in 1999: the results show that the United States has considerably more power over ordinary decisions than its weight of 17% but that the use of special supermajorities limits its power: (2) the effect of varying the majority requirement on the power of the IMF to act and the powers of members to prevent and initiate action (Coleman indices); the results show the effect of supermajorities severely limits the power to act and therefore renders the voting system ineffective in democratic terms, also the sovereignty of the United States within the IMF is effectively limited to just the power of veto: (3) the paper proposes the determination of the weights instrumentally by means of an iterative algorithm to give the required power distribution: this would be a useful procedure for determining appropriate changes in weights consequent on changes to individual countries' quotas; this is applied to the 1999 data. Policy recommendations are, first, that the IMF use only simple majority voting, and discontinue using special supermajorities, and, second, allocate voting weight instrumentally using power indices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates the impact of the electoral college on voter participation rates across states. Two hypotheses are tested. The first argues that in states where either the Democratic or Republican party strongly dominates the other, voter participation rates are reduced the greater the degree of domination. The second states that in states where neither party overwhelmingly dominates the other, the smaller the majority of the dominant party over the minority party, the greater the voter participation rate. (JEL D70, D72) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. This paper examines the influences on voting by members of the House of Representatives on the Carter Administration's welfare reform legislation. The analysis finds some support for the hypothesis that voting by national legislators responded to the potential mobility of welfare recipients from low to high benefit states. Defining the public interest as promoting economic growth and the special interest as increasing redistribution, the results also provide evidence in support of the Stigler hypothesis that politically secure legislators are better able to vote the public, as opposed to the special, interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy representation implies not only congruence between constituent and representative preferences, but also the ability of representatives to perceive and adjust to changing constituent preferences. This paper examines the extent of such representation among U.S. senators. It shows that a senator's voting behavior strongly affects his chances of election, but that senators demonstrate only a limited ability to adapt to changing constituent preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses voting behavior and aggregate policy targets in the U.S. Relationship of an aggregate vote unemployment-price change function to individual behavior; Information on the derivation of a vote-unemployment-price-change function; Factors that affect voting behavior.

This paper uses a new data set of 885 California ballot propositions from 1912 through 1990 to test the hypothesis that voter turnout increases as an election becomes closer. Various measures of voter participation are regressed on various measures of election closeness. The main finding is that there is not a systematic relation between closeness and turnout. Two conclusions are drawn: (1) voters are not sensitive to the probability their votes are decisive, and (2) other studies which found higher turnout for close elections probably detected an increased mobilization of party elites in tight races. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact of presidential campaign spending on election results. Analyses of expenditures and voting are often plagued by simultaneity between campaign spending and expected vote share. However, game-theoretic models of resource-allocation decisions made by a central actor (i.e., a presidential campaign) suggest that candidates will spend more in close races and in races likely to be pivotal. We provide empirical support for this theory; using Federal Communications Commission data from the 1972 presidential election, we find that expenditures were higher in states where the election was expected to be closer and in states likely to be pivotal. We use these two factors as instruments in a two-stage least squares model to estimate the effect of spending on votes. We find that, contrary to previous theory and research, presidential campaign spending significantly increases a candidate's vote share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a preceding companion paper, a static model of individual decision making was proposed that, due to imprecise perceptions, induces simple and inertial behavior at equilibrium ("status-quo optimal") points. This paper addresses two complementary issues. Firstly, it studies the learning dynamics induced by the model and shows that its well-defined limit behavior ranges from status-quo optimal to fully optimal, depending on the underlying features of the problem. Secondly, the paper characterizes the behavioral implications of the model and compares them with those derived from standard decision-theoretic frameworks. Specifically, it is shown that, from a Revealed-Preference perspective, status-quo optimal behavior may be identified with that rationalizable by an acyclic preference relation, possibly intransitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation as to why Eucidean distance serves as a reasonably good approximation of reality when it does not incorporate explicitly a consideration of the sides of the issue taken by the voter and candidate. The empirical evidence indicates quite clearly that Eucidean distance and side of issue are extremely highly correlated. Two general classes of explanation are offered. First, this powerful association can be seen as a function of the mathematical difficulty of actually being in close proximity to a preferred party while being on the opposite side of an issue on a 7-point scale. Second, even after this mathematical artifact is taken into account, the combined effects of assimilation, contrast, and negativity may bring favored candidates closer to the voter and drive the opposition further away, resulting in a strong correlation of Euclidean distance and side of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine what influences members viewed as shaping their voting decisions on U.S. strategy in the Persian Cuif in January 1991. Rather than focusing on predictors of votes and the outcomes of members' decision-making processes (the yea or nay votes as in roll-call analyses), I focus on the predominant considerations that members perceived as swaying voting choices. More specifically, drawing on data gathered from interviews with 365 congressional staff people, I chow that three influences in particular stand out as significant in the decision-making process on this crisis policy: members' own policy views. supportive constituents, and (for certain groups of members) the president. Thus, while the analysis confirms, in part, the conventional view of legislators' personal policy assessments as the critical influence on foreign and defense policy votes, it also underscores that this influence does not operate in a vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper finds that the relatively favorable standing of Ronald Reagan in the preelection polls helped to generate a bandwagon effect in the 1980 presidential election. The models tested here suggest that this effect was most pronounced among voters who had the weakest prior political opinions and hence were most susceptible to suggestion through the media. While the bandwagon effect that is generated is modest, after controlling for an array of other political biases, it is substantial enough to warrant further attention as the dissemintation of poll results becomes an increasingly attractive news "event." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Geraldine Ferraro was selected to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential candidate, questions were raised about why she was chosen. Was her selection an outcome of affirmative action in the political arena? The research reported in this paper investigates whether the effect of Ferraro's candidacy on voting inclinations and behavior among college students was mediated by conceptions of the procedure of affirmative action. As predicted, conceptions of affirmative action (the difference between actual and threshold ratios) influenced changes in inclination to vote Democratic in response to the Ferraro candidacy. In turn, those inclinations affected voting behavior in the 1984 presidential election. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical importance of perceived procedural fairness in the political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonpartisan municipal ballot is one of several turn-of-the-century reforms intended to weaken political parties. Through its effects on individuals' political contexts and voting experiences, it might have contributed to the twentieth-century decline in public support for political parties. This paper tests this hypothesis with items available in the 1980 CPS presidential election survey augmented with a ballot form variable. There are no significant differences in measures of party support among residents of partisan and nonpartisan communities, and thus no measurable evidence that nonpartisan elections discouraged the public from supporting political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes prenomination presidential candidate preferences, using data from the Center for Political Studies' 1984 Continuous Monitoring Survey. Among Democratic identifiers, affective evaluations of the candidates were the strongest influence on candidate preference, but judgments concerning the candidates' nomination prospects and electability also influenced candidate preference, as did strength of party identification. The outcomes of particular primaries strongly influenced voters' opinions regarding the candidates' nomination prospects and, indirectly, their electability. Walter Mondale's decisive victory in the New York primary on April 3 apparently led to a "bandwagon effect" among Democratic voters across the nation; that is, the perception that Mondale was very likely to win the nomination produced a dramatic shift in candidate preference toward Mondale and away from Gary Hart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest a probabilistic voting model where voters’ preferences for alternative public goods display habit formation. Current policies determine habit levels and in turn the future preferences of the voters. This allows the incumbent to act strategically in order to influence the probability of reelection. Comparing to a benchmark case of a certain reelection, we demonstrate that the incumbent’s optimal policy features both a more polarized allocation between the alternative public goods and a debt bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spring 2003, a survey of 1000 economists was conducted using a randomly generated membership list from the American Economics Association. The survey contained questions about 18 policy issues, voting behavior, and several background variables. The response was 264 (nonblank) surveys. The responses show that most economists are supporters of safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. They are evenly mixed on personal choice issues, military action, and the minimum wage. Most economists oppose tighter immigration controls, government ownership of enterprise and tariffs. In voting, the Democratic:Republican ratio is 2.5:1. These results are compared to those of previous surveys of economists. We itemize a series of important questions raised by these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an empirical study of the determinants of voting equipment choice in the United States. We document that, in contrast to widespread belief, voting machines of older types, such as lever and punchcard systems, are not used in counties with lower income – and newer machines, such as optical scanners and electronic machines, are not used in – richer counties. We provide an economic explanation for this and other regularities of voting equipment usage in the United States. In our economic framework (a) the adoption of a new technology is more likely in richer and larger counties, but (b) the adoption of a new technology is less likely the more advanced is the technology already adopted in the county. The adoption of more advanced optical and electronic machines in the 1980s and 1990s was less likely in richer and larger counties that had already mechanized and computerized in previous decades than in poorer and smaller – and hence not yet computerized counties. Estimates of historical determinants of voting equipment choice support our hypothesis. In particular, the probability of using punchcard machines in the 1990s is positively related to a county’s income in the 1960s, when punchcard machines were first introduced. When the effect of past income is controlled for, the effect of more recent levels of income on the probability of using punchcard machines becomes negative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using voting data for presidential elections from 1976 to 2000, this paper documents an unusual and large drop off in Republican voting rates for Florida’s western Panhandle during the 2000 General Elections. Little change appears to have occurred in the rate that non-Republicans voted. The results appear more consistent with the early call reducing Republican voting rates than the networks discouraging all voters from voting by incorrectly calling the polls closed in the western Panhandle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the differences in economic outcomes delivered by partisan governments, and the way in which voters take this into account. Estimation of autoregressive models of output growth, unemployment and inflation for U.S. post-war data; Confirmation that partisan differences in economic outcomes are actually observed in the data; Partisan cycle exhibited by the U.S. unemployment rate; Evidence that U.S. citizens tend to vote for the left party when high unemployment is expected and for the right party when high inflation is expected.

Presents a study which discussed the economic and ideological factors in Congressional voting in the 1980 election in the U.S. General theory which economists generally use to study political phenomena; Basic model used to study Congressional voting; Reason for the changes that occurred in the 1980 election.