Brad T. Gomez

The Republicans Should Pray for Rain: Weather, Turnout, and Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

The relationship between bad weather and lower levels of voter turnout is widely espoused by media, political practitioners, and, perhaps, even political scientists. Yet, there is virtually no solid empirical evidence linking weather to voter participation. This paper provides an extensive test of the claim. We examine the effect of weather on voter turnout in 14 U.S. presidential elections. Using GIS interpolations, we employ meteorological data drawn from over 22,000 U.S. weather stations to provide election day estimates of rain and snow for each U.S. county. We find that, when compared to normal conditions, rain significantly reduces voter participation by a rate of just less than 1% per inch, while an inch of snowfall decreases turnout by almost .5%. Poor weather is also shown to benefit the Republican partys vote share. Indeed, the weather may have contributed to two Electoral College outcomes, the 1960 and 2000 presidential elections.

Estimating the Electoral Effects of Voter Turnout

This article examines the electoral consequences of variation in voter turnout in the United States. Existing scholarship focuses on the claim that high turnout benefits Democrats, but evidence supporting this conjecture is variable and controversial. Previous work, however, does not account for endogeneity between turnout and electoral choice, and thus, causal claims are questionable. Using election day rainfall as an instrumental variable for voter turnout, we are able to estimate the effect of variation in turnout due to across-the-board changes in the utility of voting. We re-examine the Partisan Effects and Two-Effects Hypotheses, provide an empirical test of an Anti-Incumbent Hypothesis, and propose a Volatility Hypothesis, which posits that high turnout produces less predictable electoral outcomes. Using county-level data from the 1948–2000 presidential elections, we find support for each hypothesis. Failing to address the endogeneity problem would lead researchers to incorrectly reject all but the Anti-Incumbent Hypothesis. The effect of variation in turnout on electoral outcomes appears quite meaningful. Although election-specific factors other than turnout have the greatest influence on who wins an election, variation in turnout significantly affects vote shares at the county, national, and Electoral College levels.

Causal Attribution and Economic Voting in American Congressional Elections

This article examines the ways in which political sophistication conditions economic voting in U.S. congressional elections. At the congressional level, evidence of economic voting has been generally mixed and sometimes contradictory. In our view, much of the inconsistency in existing studies may result from a tendency to overlook significant heterogeneity in voter decisionmaking. Specifically, we argue that an individual’s ability to attribute responsibility for economic outcomes to congressional actors is a function of political sophistication. According to our theory, less sophisticated voters tend to focus their attributions of responsibility on the President (the most obvious national political figure), ignoring the influence of Congress on the national economy. More sophisticated individuals, by contrast, are capable of more diffuse attributions. Thus, to the extent that conventional economic voting occurs in congressional elections, it should be confined to the more sophisticated portion of the electorate.

Rethinking Symbolic Racism: Evidence of Attribution Bias

This paper demonstrates that cognitive tendencies related to political sophistication produce an attribution bias in the widely accepted symbolic racism scale. When this bias is controlled statistically, the effect of symbolic racism on racial policy attitudes is greatly diminished. Our theory posits that high sophisticates tend to make global/distal attributions, allowing them to associate racial inequality with broader sociopolitical causes. Less sophisticated individuals, conversely, tend to make local/proximal attributions, thus biasing them against ascribing responsibility systemically. Consequently, less sophisticated individuals tend to be classified as intolerant by the symbolic racism scale, even when controlling for factors such as ideology and anti-black affect.

Economic Voting and Political Sophistication Defending Heterogeneous Attribution

The authors reply here to Godbout and Bélangers critique of their work on political sophistication and economic voting. Principally, the authors stress the importance of using contemporaneous economic assessment and candidate preference measures in assessing their relationship. They also emphasize the empirical support for their key contentions that less sophisticated citizens tend not to credit/blame government for their own economic circumstances, and that more sophisticated citizens tend to focus on actors other than the president when attributing responsibility for the national economy. Finally, the authors stress the variety of contexts, both outside the United States and outside the domain of economic voting, in which their theory has found support.

Why John Aldrich

John Aldrich is a positive scientist—in both the scholastic and colloquial sense. A progeny of the Rochester school, Aldrichs research displays a commitment to the tenets of positive political theory. He derives internally consistent propositions and subjects those claims to empirical testing, all in an attempt to explain scientifically phenomena and institutions at the heart of democratic theory. As a mentor and builder of academic institutions, Aldrich has shown unswerving kindness, modesty, and a commitment to foster new generations of political scientists. He is a positive influence on his students, his colleagues, and the political science discipline at large.