Search

A conference paper about knowledge scales and the measurement of political sophistication to be presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association at Orlando, Florida from January 3-5, 2013. It also examines the results from these self-assessments with the judgments rendered by survey interviewers.

One of the most replicated findings in political science is links individuals' perceptions of past economic performance with the vote. Yet there are a number of reasons to expect that self-reported evaluations of the economy are endogenous to vote choice. Indeed, if endogeneity is present, then existing models cannot be viewed as providing a valid test of the causal claim derived from retrospective theories of voting. In this paper, we show that objective local economic conditions help to frame individuals' perceptions of the national economic situation and are a useful instrument for retrospective sociotropic evaluations. We use an instrumental variables probit model to assess the causal effect of these evaluations on the decision to vote for the incumbent president or his party's presidential candidate in the 1980 to 1996 U.S. presidential elections. We find that, while there is much greater uncertainty regarding the IV estimate for sociotropic evaluations, it is quite similar to the estimate obtained by a traditional probit model in which any potential endogeneity is ignored. Our results suggest that existing models of retrospective sociotropic voting may be robust against claims of endogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the electoral consequences of voter turnout in the U.S. Existing scholarship on the subject focuses primarily on the claim that high turnout benefits Democrats, but evidence supporting this conjecture is highly variable and controversial. Moreover, previous work does not account for endogeneity between turnout and electoral choice, and thus causal claims may be invalid. Using an instrumental variables approach, we reexamine the Partisan Effects and Two-Effects Hypotheses—standard explanations for how turnout affects partisan outcomes. We also provide an empirical test of an Anti-Incumbency Hypothesis and propose a Volatility Hypothesis, which argues that high turnout produces electoral consequences that are systematically less predictable. Using county-level data from the 1948-2000 U.S. presidential elections, we find support for each of these hypotheses. Our results show that prior work has may have underestimated the magnitude and range of implications of variation in voter turnout. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

See Paper ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]