Megan Mullin

Turning Personal Experience into Political Attitudes: The Effect of Local Weather on Americans’ Perceptions about Global Warming

How do people translate their personal experiences into political attitudes? It has been difficult to explore this question using observational data, because individuals are typically exposed to experiences in a selective fashion, and self-reports of exposure may be biased and unreliable. In this study, we identify one experience to which Americans are exposed nearly at random—their local weather—and show that weather patterns have a significant effect on people’s beliefs about the evidence for global warming.

How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote

A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day, and requiring firms to give their employees time off to vote. Using the 2000 Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we find that all but the last of these provisions enhance turnout, especially by the young and the less educated. Compared to a state that does none of these things, the estimated turnout of high school dropouts is nearly 11 percentage points higher in a state with these “best practices”; their effect on young registrants is nearly 10 points. Because African American and Latino registrants are disproportionately younger and less educated, they would benefit disproportionately from universal adoption of such postregistration laws. We estimate that if every state adopted these best practices, overall turnout of those registered would increase approximately three percentage points.

Get Out the Vote-by-Mail? A Randomized Field Experiment Testing the Effect of Mobilization in Traditional and Vote-by-Mail Precincts

This study extends previous field experimental research on turnout by considering how institutional context moderates the effect of mobilization. Taking advantage of a setting in which some registrants are assigned to vote by mail, the authors find that a door-to-door mobilization campaign has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than on registrants assigned to cast mail ballots, but only among individuals whose voting behavior is most likely to be shaped by extrinsic social rewards. The authors conclude that there may be payoff for election reform strategies that tap into voting’s social rewards.

City Caesars?: Institutional Structure and Mayoral Success in Three California Cities

Recently, voters in many large cities have approved charter reforms that strengthen the power of the executive, suggesting that big city residents and mayors themselves view the formal authority of the office as an important influence on whether a mayor will be successful in solving urban problems. This article employs qualitative data from three California cities to specify how structural characteristics interact with personal factors to facilitate mayoral leadership. The authors find that city structure does not directly determine a mayor’s goals and leadership style, but it does create constraints and opportunities that influence whether a mayor’s personal strategies will succeed.

Recent improvement and projected worsening of weather in the United States

As climate change unfolds, weather systems in the United States have been shifting in patterns that vary across regions and seasons. Climate science research typically assesses these changes by examining individual weather indicators, such as temperature or precipitation, in isolation, and averaging their values across the spatial surface. As a result, little is known about population exposure to changes in weather and how people experience and evaluate these changes considered together. Here we show that in the United States from 1974 to 2013, the weather conditions experienced by the vast majority of the population improved. Using previous research on how weather affects local population growth to develop an index of people’s weather preferences, we find that 80% of Americans live in counties that are experiencing more pleasant weather than they did four decades ago. Virtually all Americans are now experiencing the much milder winters that they typically prefer, and these mild winters have not been offset by markedly more uncomfortable summers or other negative changes. Climate change models predict that this trend is temporary, however, because US summers will eventually warm more than winters. Under a scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions proceed at an unabated rate (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5), we estimate that 88% of the US public will experience weather at the end of the century that is less preferable than weather in the recent past. Our results have implications for the public’s understanding of the climate change problem, which is shaped in part by experiences with local weather. Whereas weather patterns in recent decades have served as a poor source of motivation for Americans to demand a policy response to climate change, public concern may rise once people’s everyday experiences of climate change effects start to become less pleasant.

Local Response to Water Crisis Explaining Variation in Usage Restrictions During a Texas Drought

What explains local policy response to extreme events? This question takes on growing importance as climate change increases the frequency of droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires, and severe storms. Emergency events like these often require local officials to make decisions that trade off short-term risk reduction against longer-term political costs. Policies that promote community-wide safety and resilience may face opposition because they restrict resource use or otherwise limit personal activities. Using data on the adoption of local water usage restrictions during the 2010–2013 Texas drought, we examine the balance between political and problem-driven incentives for local emergency response. We find that problem conditions and institutional capacity of water systems outweigh political interests in shaping the timing of policy response.

Get Out the Vote by Mail? Evidence from a Natural/Field Experiment

Does the effectiveness of a “Get Out The Vote” (GOTV) contact depend upon the method by which a voter casts a ballot? This study investigates whether those who must vote by mail are more or less responsive to an in-person mobilization message than voters who live in traditional precincts with polling places. We combine a natural experiment designed to isolate the effects of voting by mail with a field experiment probing the impact of a door-to-door GOTV drive. Implementing this design in the November, 2008 general election in San Diego County, we hired professional canvassers to target a total of 29,717 randomly-assigned registered voters. Our preliminary results suggest that a personal GOTV contact has a larger effect on the participation of those who vote at polling places than it does on registrants assigned to vote by mail.

Response to Henrik Selin's review of Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water

In his careful and generous review of my book, Henrik Selin asks why I selected responsiveness and intergovernmental coordination as dependent variables for my analysis, therefore setting aside other policy effects that special district governance might produce. This is an important question: the delegation of policy authority to autonomous, specialized governments is a significant departure from the normal politics that takes place in a multidimensional legislature and could have a variety of consequences. To the extent that special districts have received any scholarly attention, it has focused mostly on estimating how specialization affects the level of public spending. My interest lies more in the quality of governance. What do we want from representative government? Central among our goals should be policy outcomes that are responsive both to public preferences and to public problems.

Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin

Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management . By Henrik Selin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 235p.

Does Voting by Mail Increase Participation? Using Matching to Analyze a Natural Experiment

44.00 cloth,