Stephen Ansolabehere

Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate

We address the effects of negative campaign advertising on turnout. Using a unique experimental design in which advertising tone is manipulated within the identical audiovisual context, we find that exposure to negative advertisements dropped intentions to vote by 5%. We then replicate this result through an aggregate-level analysis of turnout and campaign tone in the 1992 Senate elections. Finally, we show that the demobilizing effects of negative campaigns are accompanied by a weakened sense of political efficacy. Voters who watch negative advertisements become more cynical about the responsiveness of public officials and the electoral process.

Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Election Models

Spatial models of two-party or two-candidatecompetition almost never have pure-strategy Nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension. This paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist, even in a multidimensional setting. We derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria,and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist. The party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues. We consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties,incumbency advantages, and realigning elections.

The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Voting

A venerable supposition of American survey research is that the vast majority of voters have incoherent and unstable preferences about political issues, which in turn have little impact on vote choice. We demonstrate that these findings are manifestations of measurement error associated with individual survey items. First, we show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy, or moral issues—eliminates a large amount of measurement error and reveals issue preferences that are well structured and stable. This stability increases steadily as the number of survey items increases and can approach that of party identification. Second, we show that once measurement error has been reduced through the use of multiple measures, issue preferences have much greater explanatory power in models of presidential vote choice, again approaching that of party identification.

The Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Elections: An Analysis of State and Federal Offices, 1942–2000

Rising incumbency advantages in U.S. House elections have prompted a wave of new electoral laws, ranging from campaign nance regulations to term limits. We test a central claim for these reforms { that the incumbency advantage re°ects the collective irresponsibility inherent in legislatures. We study incumbency advantages for all state executive elections from 1942 to 2000 and contrast that with incumbency advantages in state and federal legislative elections. We nd that incumbency advantages for state executives and for legislators are similar in magnitude and have grown at the same rate over the last 60 years. If anything legislators have lower incumbency advantages than state executives. This nding reveals that the incumbency advantage is not unique to legislatures and that theories of incumbency advantages based on redistricting, legislative irresponsibility, pork barrel politics, and other features of legislatures do not explain the incumbency advantage. Some time in the late 1960s, congressional scholars began to note the increasing vote margins of U.S. House incumbents. By the mid-1970s a full-blown debate about the magnitude and sources of the incumbency advantage in US House elections had emerged. The list of potential causes is many { redistricting, congressional-bureaucratic relations, pork barrel spending, campaign nances, and declining party attachments. Broadly speaking, the debate over the sources of the incumbency advantage points either to factors that are distinctive to legislative politics, such as pork barrel politics and redistricting, or to factors that likely a®ected all o±ces, most notably the decline of party attachments or the growth of government generally. The conventional wisdom holds that legislative incumbents have uniquely high electoral advantages for two reasons. The rst is that many things that are thought to a®ect reelection rates are unique to legislatures. The most important of these are redistricting and seniority. Cox and Katz (2002) argue that the redistricting revolution caused the rise of incumbency advantages after the 1960s, because district lines can now be drawn to prevent competition. McKelvey and Reizman (1992) argue that seniority systems create a disincentive for voters to select someone else. Power within the legislature is tied to seniority, and as a legislator climbs the seniority rank the voters that legislator represents will bene t. Because all incumbents have some seniority no voters want to turn out their incumbent in the place of a new person, who will be the lowest ranked legislator. A second reason that legislators are thought to have especially large incumbency advantages is the lack of collective responsibility. Executives are held accountable for the broad performance of their agencies. Governors are responsible for economic performance; attorneys general, for crime; and so forth. Executives are also accountable for their actions: an executive decision is the decision of the individual politician. Legislatures, by contrast, are collective bodies. It is hard to know who in the legislature is responsible for a weak economy or a high crime rate. Party leaders can also coordinate legislators so that an individual legislator does not have to cast a vote that is particularly unpopular in the individuals

Replicating Experiments Using Aggregate and Survey Data: The Case of Negative Advertising and Turnout

Experiments show significant demobilizing and alienating effects of negative advertising. Although internally valid, experiments may have limited external validity. Aggregate and survey data offer two ways of providing external validation for experiments. We show that survey recall measures of advertising exposure suffer from problems of internal validity due to simultaneity and measurement error, which bias estimated effects of ad exposure. We provide valid estimates of the causal effects of ad exposure for the NES surveys using instrumental variables and find that negative advertising causes lower turnout in the NES data. We also provide a careful statistical analysis of aggregate turnout data from the 1992 Senate elections that Wattenberg and Brians (1999) recommend. These aggregate data confirm our original findings. Experiments, surveys, and aggregate data all point to the same conclusion: Negative advertising demobilizes voters.

Legislative bargaining under weighted voting

Organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting. We analyze this setting using a noncooperative bargaining game based on the Baron-Ferejohn (1989) model. Unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory, we find that each voters expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight. An exception occurs when many high-weight voters exist, as low-weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power. The model also predicts that, ex post, the coalition formateur (the party chosen to form a coalition) will receive a disproportionately high payoff. Using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001, we find strong evidence of such formateur effects.

Does Survey Mode Still Matter? Findings from a 2010 Multi-Mode Comparison

In this paper, we present data from a three-mode survey comparison study carried out in 2010. National surveys were fielded at the same time over the Internet (using an opt-in Internet panel), by telephone with live interviews (using a national RDD sample of landlines and cell phones), and by mail (using a national sample of residential addresses). Each survey utilized a nearly identical questionnaire soliciting information across a range of political and social indicators, many of which can be validated with government data. Comparing the findings from the modes to each other and the validated benchmarks, we demonstrate that a carefully executed opt-in Internet panel produces estimates that are as accurate as a telephone survey and that the two modes differ little in their estimates of other political indicators and their correlates.

Equal Votes, Equal Money: Court-Ordered Redistricting and Public Expenditures in the American States

Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislativeseats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology

7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation.

Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures: When and Why Does Malapportionment Matter?

We examine the relative performance of voting technologies by studying presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial election returns across hundreds of counties in the United States from 1988 to 2000. Relying on a fixed-effects regression applied to an unbalanced panel of counties, we find that in presidential elections, traditional paper ballots produce the lowest rates of uncounted votes (i.e., “residual votes”), followed by optically scanned ballots, mechanical lever machines, direct register electronic machines (DREs), and punch cards. In gubernatorial and senatorial races, paper, optical scan ballots, and DREs are significantly better in minimizing the residual vote rate than mechanical lever machines and punch cards. If all jurisdictions in the United States that used punch cards in 2000 had used optically scanned ballots instead, we estimate that approximately 500,000 more votes would have been attributed to presidential candidates nationwide.