Robert P. Van Houweling

The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity

Candidates often make ambiguous statements about the policies they intend to pursue. In theory, ambiguity affects how voters make choices and who wins elections. In practice, measurement and endogeneity problems have impeded empirical research about the consequences of ambiguity. We conducted survey experiments that overcame these obstacles by manipulating a common form of ambiguity: the imprecision of candidate positions. Our data show that, on average, ambiguity does not repel and may, in fact, attract voters. In nonpartisan settings, voters who have neutral or positive attitudes toward risk, or who feel uncertain about their own policy preferences, tend to embrace ambiguity. In partisan settings, voters respond even more positively to ambiguity; they optimistically perceive the locations of ambiguous candidates from their own party without pessimistically perceiving the locations of vague candidates from the opposition. We further find, through analysis of two additional new data sets, that candidates often take—and voters frequently perceive—ambiguous positions like the ones in our experiments. The pervasive use of ambiguity in campaigns fits with our experimental finding that ambiguity can be a winning strategy, especially in partisan elections.

How Does Voting Equipment Affect the Racial Gap in Voided Ballots

An accumulating body of research suggests that African Americans cast invalid ballots at a higher rate than whites. Our analysis of a unique precinct-level dataset from South Carolina and Louisiana shows that the black-white gap in voided ballots depends crucially on the voting equipment people use. In areas with punch cards or optically scanned ballots, the black-white gap ranged from four to six percentage points. Lever and electronic machines, which prohibit overvoting and make undervoting more transparent and correctible, cut the discrepancy by a factor of ten. Judging from exit polls and opinion surveys, much of the remaining difference could be due to intentional undervoting, which African Americans profess to practice at a slightly higher rate than whites. In any case, the use of appropriate voting technologies can virtually eliminate the black-white disparity in invalid ballots.

Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence from California's 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment

Why do most African Americans and other racial liberals vote Democratic, while most racial conservatives (largely whites) vote Republican? To what extent is this alignment of race and party attributable to the strategic choice of GOP elites to take the party in a racially conservative direction during the mid-1960s? This paper exploits a little-known ballot initiative in postwar California to shed light on the question. Proposition 11, as it was known, would have outlawed discrimination in employment if it had passed. Instead, it failed by more than a two-to-one margin. Drawing on archival and statistical evidence, including the ecological analysis of precinct-level election returns, we find that Republican voters were much more likely than Democratic voters to oppose Proposition 11, despite Republican governor Earl Warrens well-known support for fair employment practices legislation. We conclude that many Republican voters tended strongly toward racial conservatism well before Republican elites decided to pursue racially conservative policies in the mid-1960s. We suggest that the emergence of the contemporary alignment of race and party may have been less contingent on elite strategy and more structurally determined than the conventional wisdom allows.