Betsy Sinclair

Redefine Statistical Significance

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries.

Causality in Political Networks

Investigations of American politics have increasingly turned to analyses of political networks to understand public opinion, voting behavior, the diffusion of policy ideas, bill sponsorship in the legislature, interest group coalitions and influence, party factions, institutional development, and other empirical phenomena. While the association between political networks and political behavior is well established, clear causal inferences are often difficult to make. This article consists of five independent essays that address practical problems in making causal inferences from studies of political networks. They consider egocentric studies of national probability samples, sociocentric studies of political communities, measurement error in elite surveys, field experiments on networks, and triangulating on causal processes.

Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior: The Effects of Primary Processes

Electoral institutions can affect the voting behavior of legislators who are elected through those institutions. In this article, the authors apply social network theory to study patterns of legislative choices under different primary election systems, and this approach leads the authors to study how electoral institutions affect legislative behavior differently than most previous research—that is, they focus on how electoral institutions affect the interactions between legislators. The authors use data on legislative voting behavior from the California State Assembly and exploit the changes that have been implemented in California’s primary elections process over the past two decades. Specifically, they hypothesize that legislators who were elected during the years in which a nonpartisan blanket primary was used in California (1998 and 2000) will be more centrally networked and more likely to compromise with other legislators. They find evidence to support their hypothesis: legislators elected under the nonpartisan blanket primary are more likely to agree with other legislators. Electoral institutions, especially primary elections, have important effects on legislative behavior. The authors’ results have implications for highly polarized state legislatures.

Mobilizing Pasadena Democrats: Measuring The Effects of Partisan Campaign Contacts

This paper examines the effect of an entire campaign using a randomized field experiment where the treatment consists of campaign decisions made by a campaign manager. In contrast to the majority of the field experiments found in the contemporary get-out-the-vote literature, this paper studies the actual behavior of a campaign within a particular election as opposed to studying particular mobilization tactics. Thus, the campaign itself chooses the method used to contact each individual within the randomly assigned treatment group. Contacts are made via face-to-face canvassing, phone calls, e-mails, and door hangers and consist of experienced volunteers making partisan appeals. We observe a large treatment effect of campaign contact despite a small number of face-to-face contacts, suggesting that the targeting strategy of the campaign manager is particularly effective.

Flooding the Vote: Hurricane Katrina and Voter Participation in New Orleans

To what extent did the extensive flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina affect voter participation in the 2006 mayoral election? This article uses voting record data from 20 election cycles, GIS-coded flood-depth data, and census data to examine the voting behavior of registered voters in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. We use a variety of statistical techniques, primarily propensity score matching methods, to examine how flooding affected mayoral turnout. We find that flooding decreased participation, but registered voters who experienced more than 6 ft of flooding were more likely to participate in the election than those who experienced less flooding. This finding confirms that increasing the cost of voting decreases turnout and suggests several mechanisms motivating an expressive component of voting behavior. Our results indicate there is a complex relationship between participation and the costs and benefits of turnout. Our findings about the characteristics of the voters who participated in the mayoral election provide insights into the scope of change for the political landscape of New Orleans.

The American Internet Voter

Since the creation of the Internet, there has been a seemingly never-ending number of books and analyses about the role of the Internet in politics. Many of these books fail to keep in mind that the behavior of elites—the well-educated and politically active individuals who often represent the peer group of these authors—is not generally representative of the behavior of the public at large. Pundits and scholars alike have remarked that 2008 appeared to be a revolutionary year in the use of the Internet in political campaigns, but few have systematically examined the role of the Internet in participatory politics for the average voter. Instead of relying on case studies, this article uses nationally representative survey data from 2004 through 2008 to determine how the general public uses—or does not use—the Internet in their political lives. The authors then consider whether the patterns of use for this technology appear different in the November 2008 general election cycle. They consider this issue in the context of increasing polarization among some fraction of the American electorate and in the policy platforms of elected officials.

“It’s Largely a Rigged System”: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016:

The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to counter Trump’s claims. Second, literature on voter confidence has established a “winner effect”—voters who cast ballots for winners are more likely than voters on the losing side to believe their vote was counted correctly. Thus, voters were exposed to two theoretically opposite effects. In this paper, we find that the “winner” effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. We also show the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue, find a symmetry of the election outcome effect for winners and losers, and reconsider our explanations of the winner effect. Finally, we go beyond the existing studies of the winner effect to consider the kind of citizens who are most susceptible to that effect.