Cecilia Hyunjung Mo

Irrelevant events affect voters' evaluations of government performance

Does information irrelevant to government performance affect voting behavior? If so, how does this help us understand the mechanisms underlying voters’ retrospective assessments of candidates’ performance in office? To precisely test for the effects of irrelevant information, we explore the electoral impact of local college football games just before an election, irrelevant events that government has nothing to do with and for which no government response would be expected. We find that a win in the 10 d before Election Day causes the incumbent to receive an additional 1.61 percentage points of the vote in Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections, with the effect being larger for teams with stronger fan support. In addition to conducting placebo tests based on postelection games, we demonstrate these effects by using the betting markets estimate of a teams probability of winning the game before it occurs to isolate the surprise component of game outcomes. We corroborate these aggregate-level results with a survey that we conducted during the 2009 NCAA mens college basketball tournament, where we find that surprising wins and losses affect presidential approval. An experiment embedded within the survey also indicates that personal well-being may influence voting decisions on a subconscious level. We find that making people more aware of the reasons for their current state of mind reduces the effect that irrelevant events have on their opinions. These findings underscore the subtle power of irrelevant events in shaping important real-world decisions and suggest ways in which decision making can be improved.

Social Exclusion and Political Identity: The Case of Asian American Partisanship

How does social exclusion on the basis of racial/ethnic identity affect partisanship and political attitudes? Drawing on sociological research on the group basis of partisanship and psychological theories of social identity, we contend that exclusion at the individual level stemming from racial/ethnic group membership can affect political identity. People who feel that a political party excludes them from the American social fabric based on their race/ethnicity should be less likely to perceive that party as serving their group’s interests and therefore less likely to support that party. We apply our theory to Asian Americans, an understudied minority population that is becoming increasingly politically relevant. Through both a large-scale, representative survey and a novel laboratory experiment, we find empirical support for our principal hypothesis. Our findings partly explain why Asian Americans are overwhelmingly likely to identify as Democrats and advance an identity-oriented explanation of partisanship in American electoral politics.

Determining false-positives requires considering the totality of evidence.

Fowler and Montagnes (1) independently replicate one finding in Healy et al. (2): that college football wins increase incumbent vote share. Although we interpret this result as evidence of irrelevant events impacting voters’ decisions, which is consistent with established theory in the psychological and decision sciences literatures, Fowler and Montagnes (1) conclude that chance is responsible. False-positives can occur. Consequently, we performed several tests to address that possibility (2), but Fowler and Montagnes (1) surprisingly ignore these analyses. Although replication and reanalysis are important to scientific discovery, one cannot selectively consider pieces of evidence when evaluating past research. Our consideration of the totality of evidence [the full results in Healy et al. (2) and the new results in Fowler and Montagnes (1)] leads us to conclude that college football games influence elections.

Economic Development, Mobility, and Political Discontent: An Experimental Test of Tocqueville’s Thesis in Pakistan

We consider the thesis of Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) that economic development and increased mobility may generate political discontent not present in more stagnant economies. For many citizens, as they become aware of the potential for improved living standards, their aspirations may increase faster than actual living standards. Expanded opportunity may then paradoxically result in dissatisfaction with government rather than greater confidence. We develop a formal model to capture Tocqueville’s (1856) verbal theory and test its predictions using a 2012–2013 face-to-face survey experiment conducted in Pakistan. The experiment utilizes established treatments to subtly manipulate either a participant’s perceptions of her own economic well-being, her perceptions of society-wide mobility, or both. As predicted by the theory, political discontent rises when declining personal well-being coincides with high mobility to create unrealized aspirations. The results thus identify the conditions under which expanded economic opportunity can lead to political unrest.