Aaron C. Weinschenk

Campaigns, Mobilization, and Turnout in Mayoral Elections

Research on local turnout has focused on institutions, with little attention devoted to examining the impact of campaigns. Using an original data set containing information from 144 large U.S. cities and 340 separate mayoral elections over time, our contributions to the scholarship in this field are manifold: we focus the literature more squarely on the impact of campaigns by examining the role of campaign effort (measured with campaign expenditures), candidates, and competition in voter mobilization; demonstrate the relative importance of challenger versus incumbent campaign effort in incumbent contests; and show that changes in campaign activities influence changes in turnout over time.

Personality Traits and the Sense of Civic Duty

Recently, a burgeoning literature has developed around the idea that personality traits influence political attitudes and orientations. There has also been increasing recognition that orientations like the sense of civic duty exert a powerful influence on voting behavior. Despite the theoretical and empirical importance of civic duty, little research has investigated its antecedents. This article turns to individual personality traits as a potential explanation for why some people feel a stronger sense of civic duty than others. The analysis shows that a number of the Big Five traits shape an individual’s sense of civic duty, with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness having statistically significant (p < .05) effects. The effects of personality traits rival and, in some cases, exceed the influence of variables that have typically been used to explain the sense of duty, including income. In the end, this study provides new evidence that personality traits influence broad orientations toward political life.

Bringing the President Back In The Collapse of Lehman Brothers and the Evolution of Retrospective Voting in the 2008 Presidential Election

Despite prevailing negative conditions, initial analyses of the 2008 presidential election, including this one, find significant but not particularly strong economic voting effects during the fall campaign. In this article, the authors pay special attention to how the economic information context changed during the campaign and how those changes affected the evolution of retrospective voting. The findings show that there were two distinct phases of the fall campaign, that retrospective voting was nonexistent prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers but was strong following the collapse. In effect, the collapse of Lehman Brothers turned the election into a referendum election.

Convention effects: examining the impact of national presidential nominating conventions on information, preferences, and behavioral intentions

ABSTRACT We ask whether and how US presidential nominating conventions matter in contemporary US elections. Using individual-level panel data, we find evidence that the conventions exert important effects on the electorate by influencing post-convention intentions to participate in electoral politics, knowledge about the candidates, and candidate favorability ratings, even after controlling for pre-convention intentions, knowledge, and candidate ratings. We conclude that conventions remain important campaign events that play a role in facilitating democratic processes in America.

Political Trust in the American States

This article illustrates that trust in state government varies considerably across states. Using newly available public opinion data, the authors investigate the effects of political polarization, corruption, income inequality, unemployment, state fiscal conditions, median income, ideology, state size, tax rates, and social capital on differences in trust in state government. A number of these variables have statistically significant effects on trust in state government, including state fiscal conditions, unemployment, state ideology, and corruption. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for policy makers and elected officials.

The Relationship between Genes, Personality Traits, and Political Interest:

Political interest is one of the strongest predictors of individual political engagement, but little is known about the origins of this political orientation. The goal of this paper is to clarify the role that biological and psychological factors play in the formation of political interest. A series of recent studies in genetics have illustrated that political interest is heritable, and a series of recent studies in political science and psychology have demonstrated that personality traits, many of which are heritable, are related to political interest. In this paper, we make a number of contributions to the literature: (1) we replicate previous analyses showing that political interest and personality traits are heritable, (2) we demonstrate that personality traits are related to interest, and (3) we estimate the extent to which genetic factors account for the correlation between personality traits and political interest. Using two datasets on twins, we find evidence that genetic factors account for a large amount of the correlation between political interest and personality traits. This study provides a more nuanced picture of the biological and psychological bases of political orientations.

The Determinants of Campaign Spending in Mayoral Elections

We examine why levels of campaign spending vary across U.S. mayoral elections. Although there has been debate about the extent to which spending is damaging or beneficial, few analyses have sought to understand the factors that inhibit or promote campaign spending. We focus on the impact of city-level attributes, political institutions, and contest-specific factors and find that a number of the variables we consider have important effects on campaign spending, including local government form, term length, scope of local government, an experienced candidate pool, and open seat and runoff elections. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for local policy makers.

Polarization, Ideology, and Vote Choice in U.S. Congressional Elections

Despite the debate about mass polarization, most scholars agree that parties in Congress have become increasingly polarized over time. Scholars have sought to connect party polarization to the beliefs and perceptions of individual citizens, but little work exists on the relationship between polarization and the vote choices made by ordinary citizens. In this article, I examine the link between party polarization at the elite level, the use of ideology by citizens, and their vote choices in Congressional elections. I argue that the increased polarization that has occurred over time has led people to place more weight on ideology when casting their votes in U.S. House elections. My hypothesis stems from work on group conflict theory, which suggests that when people sense a high degree of conflict between two groups, a cue from elites, they will be more likely to rely on their own relevant characteristics or attitudes when making choices. This study differs from previous work on Congressional elections in that I examine variation in the effect of ideology on vote choice over multiple elections rather than just in one or two elections. I argue that an exploration of the political context (or the political context perceived by voters) is necessary in order to more fully understand the use of ideology in U.S. elections. To the extent that polarization facilitates the use of information shortcuts among voters, it might be viewed as a positive development within the context of electoral politics.

’Cause You’ve Got Personality

The integration of the Big Five personality traits into models of political participation represents an important advance in the political behavior literature. However, because national surveys that include political and personality measures are not widespread, such analyses have been limited in number. In addition, there have been inconsistencies within and across studies on personality and participation. The availability of more data make it possible to compare the performance of personality measurement batteries across recent political surveys, reexamine hypotheses about the link between personality and participation, test the explanatory power of personality across samples and in different contexts, and expand measures of political and civic engagement, all of which I do in this article. Personality traits do influence political participation, although the magnitude and direction of effects depend on the particular act. Extraversion has a consistent effect on participation, but the effects of Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability are much less consistent.

The Dynamics of Voter Preferences in the 2016 Presidential Election

Abstract Using daily polling data collected during the 2016 election, we examine the impact of fundamental conditions, campaign events, media coverage, and other relevant events and announcement on preference dynamics. We observe shifts in voter preferences for president over the course of the campaign and find evidence that these dynamics can be explained by specific circumstances and conditions. Our findings reinforce the potency of fundamental conditions, like presidential approval, but they also demonstrate that political events like national nominating conventions and debates can affect preferences in meaningful and enduring ways. Importantly, our research also suggests that developments commonly perceived to have affected voter preferences in 2016, like FBI Director James Comey’s memo to Congress about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in October, likely exerted a minimal impact on the election, at least once the impact of other factors are taken into account. In this respect, some of our findings conflict with conventional accounts of campaign dynamics in 2016.