Greg Vonnahme

Candidate Cues and Voter Confidence in American Elections

A primary objective of election administration is ensuring voter confidence. Logically, this entails meeting two conditions: procedures should insure that elections are fair and accurate, and voters should be aware of the procedures. Yet American election procedures such as ballot access and design, post-election audits and recounts, voter registration, and polling place operations are complex and highly decentralized. Given the complexity of the information environment and the relatively limited information most voters have about politics, what (if any) connection is there between election administration and voter confidence? We consider whether candidates fill the gap between election administration and voter confidence in elections. We test several hypotheses using an experimental design with multiple measures of voter confidence. The results show that candidates have a significant effect on voter confidence.

Examining Inequities in Campaign Money in State Legislative Elections

There is a striking level of inequality in campaign money in state legislative elections as many candidates have relatively little campaign money while a few candidates raise much more. This paper examines the origins of these inequalities. The paper conceptualizes contributions as a type of attachment between donors and candidates, and analyzes how these attachments are formed over the course of a campaign. The study considers a preferential attachment process in which donors are likely to contribute to candidates that already have many previous donors. This model not only has implications for donor-level decision-making but also implies a rich-get-richer effect which could account for candidate-level inequalities. The research design analyzes data on nearly 900,000 contributions in the 2010 state legislative elections and finds strong empirical support for the preferential attachment process.