Kelly D. Patterson

The Human Dimension of Elections: How Poll Workers Shape Public Confidence in Elections

Voting technologies received considerable scrutiny after the 2000 election. However, the voter—poll worker interaction is also of critical importance. Poll workers exercise discretion and implement policies in ways that directly affect the voting experience. The authors examine the relationship between voters’ perceptions of the poll worker job performance and measures of voter confidence. In an ordered logit model, the perception of poll workers is a significant predictor of voter confidence even in the presence of numerous controls. The results suggest that overlooking the recruitment and training of competent poll workers can have a detrimental effect on voter confidence.

Agenda Setting in Congressional Elections: The Impact of Issues and Campaigns on Voting Behavior

Do issues matter? This article extends recent research on issue voting and campaign agenda-setting to voting decisions in congressional elections. We use a unique data set that includes information from a survey of candidates and campaign aides who competed in the 1998 House elections and a survey of individuals who voted in them. The study assesses the impact of campaign-specific variables on citizens’ voting decisions, while controlling for relevant attitudinal and demographic factors. We find that when a candidate and voter agree on what is the most important issue in the election, the voter is more likely to vote for that candidate if that candidate’s party “owns” the issue. The effects of shared issue priorities are especially strong for independent voters.

Tea Time in America? The Impact of the Tea Party Movement on the 2010 Midterm Elections

By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movements primary issues.

Poll Workers and the Vitality of Democracy: An Early Assessment

The aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constant learning in regards to election administration in the United States. Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily on voting technology and on which voting technologies were best at capturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project developed the “residual vote” metric; numerous studies have since examined residual vote rates across different voting platforms. Congressional reform of elections—exemplified in the “Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002” (P.L. 107-252)—also focused largely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards for voting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aid in its purchase.Authors are listed alphabetically. The data collection in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was funded by the Election Science Institute (ESI) through a contract with the Cuyahoga County Commission. We are grateful to Steven Hertzberg of ESI for his assistance in the data collection. The Utah poll-worker survey was funded by the Institute of Public and International Affairs (IPIA) at the University of Utah. Steven Snell of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University provided valuable research assistance for this project.

PARTISAN CHANGE IN THE MOUNTAIN WEST

During the 1980s partisanship in the Mountain West shifted dramatically toward the Republican Party. This change was the result of issue-based conversion rather than group mobilization. Specifically, we trace this surge to Reagans transformation of the issues connected with the Republican Party. Previous discussions of issue-based conversion have assumed that this force influences all voters equally. One of the issues behind the Mountain Wests changed partisanship follows this pattern: Individualism (or limiting government influence on the individual) was behind both the Mountain West surge (and decline) in Republicanism and the nationwide growth in that party. But the second issue did not follow this pattern: Abortion influenced the Mountain West selectively. We conclude that partisan change can be the result of uniform influence of issue change, but that it can also be the result of issue changes that influence different groups of voters differentially.

Twenty Years of the Utah Colleges Exit Poll: Learning by Doing

The primary purpose of this article is to describe how a Utah statewide exit poll is performed by undergraduate statistics and political science students at Brigham Young University (BYU) as an ambitious sampling class project. The article describes how BYU students are organized into a virtual polling firm and sample polling places throughout the state by training student pollsters from other Utah colleges and universities. Although the BYU students begin fall semester knowing very little about the polling process, student committees are assigned the tasks of modeling voter turnout, designing a complex sample, coordinating with county officials, creating the questionnaires, training pollsters, gathering data, computing sample estimates, and discussing on a live televised Election Day program why voters voted as they did. From a pedagogical perspective, exit polls have all the advantages of other sampling projects and one feature seldom found in statistical applications: Within 12 to 24 hours in most years, the vote tally is complete and the validity of statistical inference is demonstrated by comparing the sample projections and confidence intervals to the true parameter value! A second purpose of the article is to describe the Utah Colleges Exit Poll in

Exceeding Expectations? Determinants of Satisfaction with the Voting Process in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

The 2000 U.S. presidential election resulted in states introducing new voting systems and election administration procedures. The election also raised concerns that poor experiences at the polls would produce lower levels of confidence in the electoral process or lower turnout. Drawing on theories used in organizational psychology and marketing and using an internet-administered panel survey, we assess the impact of voters’ expectations on their satisfaction in the 2008 elections. The findings indicate that voters have different expectations about the voting process and that these expectations condition the ways in which voters assess their experience. Therefore, a complete explanation of voter satisfaction with the voting process must account for both the expectations voters bring to the polling place and the experiences voters have there.

Local Political Context and Negative Campaigns

ABSTRACT Research into the intended and unintended consequences of negative campaigns has spawned a variety of approaches and a variety of contradictory findings. This paper suggests that some of the contradictions are likely due to methodological issues. First, we examine the use of elite assessment as an improved means of operationalizing the tone of political campaigns. Second, several hypotheses about the mediating effects of local electoral culture are tested. That is, we first derive a measure of negativity from the perceptions of newspaper editors and reporters who covered the 1998 congressional campaigns in the USA, and then merge this information with the 1998 NES data to measure the effects on respondents in different electoral subcultures. We find that the unintended effects of negative campaigns are more pronounced in U.S. states with little or no history of partisan competition. We conclude that elite assessment should be considered as a method for measuring a races “negativity” and that context is a key component in sorting out the “unintended effects” mystery.

Who's In and Who's Out: The Politics of Religious Norms

What are the boundaries for discussing a candidates religion? In the 2008 and the 2012 presidential campaigns, the religious beliefs and practices of at least one of the candidates became a subject of intense scrutiny from the media and the public. To ascertain the limits of social discourse for religious out-group, we conducted a survey experiment on the 2012 CCES survey. We find strong evidence that norms of social discourse do not apply to all religions equally. Furthermore, the application of norms differs by political party because Democrats and Republicans express concerns about different religious groups. Overall, there is a large difference for Muslims when it comes to social discourse. Finally, individuals have internalized the norms because most of them are willing to sanction those who violate them, even if the norms on social discourse are not applied equally among American voters.

Public Administration Ethics A Postmodern Perspective

Public administration ethics today is dominated by two distinct ethical frameworks: the bureaucratic ethos, which stresses efficiency and strict obedience to elected officials, and the democratic ethos, which stresses adherence to certain higher order moral principles embedded in the notion of democratic government. Both the bureaucratic and democratic ethos are foundational in that each is based on the search for certain universal or quasi-universal principles thought to imply moral obligation, from which ethical behavior may be deduced or judged. The authors argue that public administration ought to consider a third, or “postmodern,” approach to administrative ethics, one that is dialogic rather than foundational. The dialogic approach begins with the question of ontology, or in other words, the question of being. By considering the shortcomings of foundational approaches to administrative ethics and taking seriously a dialogic approach, public administration can better understand the limitations of its own methods and the way in which these methods are themselves products of a particular approach to society and its regulation. Discovering the hidden assumptions behind the traditional approaches to administrative ethics thus creates the space for an understanding of public administration that sees itself as a truly human activity.