John A. Henderson

Rain and Representation: The Effect of Margin of Victory on Incumbent Legislative Behavior

We develop and assess an elite-information account of representation. Accordingly, politicians face uncertainty about voter opinion, and use previous vote-margins to gauge their future electoral prospects. Unexpected losses in prior support will elicit ideological moderation given new information about an electorate. To test this account, we use rain around Election Day as a natural experiment in congressional voting. In studying U.S. House races from 1956 to 2008, we find each additional inch of election rainfall exogenously dampens Democratic vote-margins by 1.3 to 2.9 percentage points, and shifts incumbents rightward in their roll call positions in subsequent Congresses. We find this responsiveness mainly in competitive districts with the greatest risk of defeat, and by Democrats rather than Republicans suggesting asymmetry in party representation. Overall, we show that idiosyncratic electoral effects can meaningfully impact legislative behavior, and highlight an information mechanism that may help explain representation.

Mediating the Electoral Connection: The Information Effects of Voter Signals on Legislative Behavior

We develop and assess an information account of representation. Accordingly, politicians face uncertainty about voter opinion and use previous vote margins to gauge future electoral outcomes. Losses in vote support elicit ideological moderation given new information about electorates. To test this account, we use rain around Election Day as a natural experiment in voting in the US House races from 1956 to 2008. We find that each additional inch of rainfall exogenously dampens Democratic vote margins by 1.4–2.0 percentage points and shifts incumbents rightward in their roll call positions in subsequent Congresses. We find responsiveness mainly in competitive districts with the greatest risk of defeat, and by Democrats rather than Republicans, suggesting an asymmetry in party representation. Overall, we highlight the importance of elite information uncertainty as a mechanism driving the electoral connection, and we show that idiosyncratic electoral effects can meaningfully impact legislative behavior.

Estimating Causal Effects Using Coarsened Treatments as Instruments

Researchers often estimate causal effects in experimental or observational studies after coarsening continuous measures of treatments. In the statistical matching context, in particular, non-discrete interventions are frequently discretized to facilitate pair-stratification using traditional matching approaches for binary treatments. A well-known issue in studying coarsened interventions is that any coarsening induces measurement error that attenuates estimates, while inflating estimator standard errors. While this bias is known, there is yet no standard correction for it. This research note illustrates the error-in-variables structure underlying the use of discrete transformations of non-discrete (or dose) interventions. It also recommends the use of the standard IV estimator to recover an unbiased estimate of the uncoarsened treatment effect. Particular attention is given to the problem of matching with a continuous intervention, which motivates simulations.

Demobilizing a Generation: The Behavioral Effects of the Vietnam Draft Lottery

A generation of men were assigned lottery numbers based on birth dates to determine draft status during the Vietnam War. This natural experiment offers an ideal setting to assess the behavioral and psychological effects of differential exposure to the risk of serving and dying in a politically controversial military conflict. However, a conventional analysis of these effects may be biased by out-of-sample attrition associated with lottery numbers and behavioral outcomes. We develop a novel methodological approach, maximum entropy imputation (MEI) to correct for potential attrition bias in estimating causal effects in experiments. MEI reweights observations to construct a synthetic sample from the group of ‘non-attritioners’ that near-perfectly resemble actual ‘attritioners’ in observable characteristics. We discuss the assumptions of MEI for identifying causal inferences, and present the results from a series of validation tests that assess the reasonableness of these assumptions in the context of the Vietnam draft lottery. We then employ MEI to estimate the effects of the lottery on important political outcomes in the Youth-Parent Political Socialization Study, and show that the draft lottery may have had the overall effect of disengaging the political participation of a generation of men, while simultaneously inducing more conservative political attitudes.

Gerrymandering Incumbency: Does Non-Partisan Redistricting Increase Electoral Competition?

Many political advocacy groups, journalists, and scholars view redistricting as a major force to insulate legislative incumbents from electoral defeat. Motivated by this concern, reformers have proposed giving control over redistricting to “politically neutral” independent commissions. Freed from partisan and electoral pressure, independent redistrictors would be expected to draw districts without giving favor to parties or incumbents. We analyze two novel data sets of simulated and alternative redistricting plans to evaluate whether maps drawn by independent commissions are more electorally competitive than those produced by party-controlled legislatures. We find that redistrictors marginally help sustain the electoral security of incumbents. Yet counter to expectations, we find that independent redistrictors produce virtually the same degree of insulation as plans devised in legislatures or by politician commissions. Overall, our results suggest caution in overhauling state redistricting institutions as a mechanism to increase electoral competition; independent commissions may not be as politically neutral as theorized.Many political advocacy groups, journalists, and scholars view redistricting as a major force to insulate legislative incumbents from electoral defeat. Motivated by this concern, reformers have pro...

An Experimental Approach to Measuring Ideological Positions in Political Text

Though powerful as general tools, automated measures of position-taking in text often perform poorly when models of speech are difficult to develop or theoretically contested. Rather than model text, I develop an experimental approach to measure perceptions of partisanship in speech, with an application to 2008 Congressional advertisements. I randomly assign ads to subjects recruited in a large-N survey, and ask them to ‘guess’ the party of featured candidates, with ads scored as their average party inference. These party perception scores are empirically synonymous with a liberal-conservative dimension, and highly reliable across samples and experimental conditions. Party identity has little impact on guesses, indicating the inferential task significantly mutes partisan bias. For validation, I assess which words influence guessing, and whether ad-scores correspond to expectations about how candidates target voters. Importantly, this experimental approach can augment or validate automated text analysis, and generalize to study speech across many other contexts.

What Goes with Red and Blue? Assessing Partisan Cognition through Conjoint Classification Experiments

Political parties can provide valuable information to voters by cultivating distinct associations between their labels, issue priorities, policies and group traits. Yet, there is considerable debate over which associations voters incorporate, and whether these are accurate. In this study, we develop a novel conjoint classification experiment designed to map voters’ partisan associative networks. We ask respondents to ‘guess’ the party and ideology of hypothetical candidates given fully randomized issue priorities and biographical details. This inferential approach minimizes the biasing effects of partisan boosting in measuring the relative associations voters make between attributes and parties, and the impact these mappings have on candidate evaluations. We find voters consistently link many issues with party and ideological labels, but agree far less on associations with candidate attributes. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in the information value of party reputations, with implications for theories of democratic competence and empirical findings emerging from candidate-vignette designs.

Seeing Spots: An Experimental Examination of Voter Appetite for Partisan and Negative Campaign Ads

We utilize a novel experimental design to assess voter selectivity to political advertising. We randomly expose respondents to comparable positive or negative ads aired by Democratic or Republican candidates from the 2012 Presidential race and the 2013 Virginia Gubernatorial contest. The experiment closely mirrors real consumption of campaign information by allowing subjects to skip ads after five seconds, re-watch and share ads with friends. Using these measures of ad-seeking behavior, we find little evidence that negativity influences self-exposure to election advertising. We find partisans disproportionately tune out ads aired by their party’s opponents, though this behavior is asymmetric: Republican-identifiers are more consistent screeners of partisan ads than Democrats. The results advance our understanding of selectivity, showing that party source, and not ad tone, interacts with partisanship to mediate campaign exposure. The findings have important implications about the role self-exposure to information plays in campaigns and elections in a post-broadcast era.