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"Brian F. Schaffner"
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The Heightened Importance of Racism and Sexism in the 2018 US Midterm Elections
In 2016, attitudes related to racism and sexism were strong predictors of vote choice for president. Since then, issues related to race and gender have continued to be an important part of the political agenda. This letter shows that hostile sexism and denial of racism emerged as stronger predictors of the House vote in the 2018 cycle than they had been in 2016. The results show that the increased importance of these factors came largely from the shifting of less sexist and less racist voters from voting Republican in 2016 to voting for Democrats in 2018. Overall, the results suggest that Trump's hostility towards women and minorities is becoming part of the Republican Party's brand, and that this appears to have created an electoral penalty for Republican candidates in 2018.
Journal Article
A cash lottery increases voter turnout
Reform efforts to improve turnout typically focus on reducing the costs of participation or strengthening appeals to civic duty. While these efforts generate modest effects, this paper explores whether citizens might respond to extrinsic rewards to encourage voting. We conduct a field experiment offering lottery prizes to undergraduate students in conjunction with a student government election at a major public university. We find that extrinsic rewards appear to boost voting significantly in these low turnout elections and that the effects of a lottery appear to be especially strong among those of lower socio-economic status.
Journal Article
Do conservatives really have better mental well-being than liberals?
American conservatives tend to rate their mental health more positively than their liberal counterparts. One explanation for this finding is that conservatives may be more likely to justify existing inequalities in society, leading to a palliative effect on their mental health that does not happen for liberals. Conservatives also score higher on personality and attitude measures, such as religiosity, marital status, and patriotism, which are associated with better mental health. We examine whether this ideological mental health gap holds for a different facet of well-being that is closely related to mental health. Further, we suggest that the ideological mental health gap may have more to do with a stigmatized reaction to the term “mental health” which has become increasingly politicized in the US context since its introduction to literature in the early 20th century. First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.
Journal Article
Walking the walk? Experiments on the effect of pledging to vote on youth turnout
Psychological theories of political behavior suggest that commitments to perform a certain action can significantly increase the likelihood of such action, but this has rarely been tested in an experimental context. Does pledging to vote increase turnout? In cooperation with the Environmental Defense Fund during the 2016 election, we conduct the first randomized controlled trials testing whether young people who pledge to vote are more likely to turn out than those who are contacted using standard Get-Out-the-Vote materials. Overall, pledging to vote increased voter turnout by 3.7 points among all subjects and 5.6 points for people who had never voted before. These findings lend support for theories of commitment and have practical implications for mobilization efforts aimed at expanding the electorate.
Journal Article
Misinformation or Expressive Responding?
Abstract
The public’s party-driven misinformation and misperceptions about politics has drawn a great deal of attention from scholars over the past decade. While much of this research assumes that the misinformation documented by survey researchers is an accurate reflection of what individuals truly believe, other scholars have suggested that individuals intentionally and knowingly provide misinformation to survey researchers as a way of showing support for their political side. To date, it has been difficult to adjudicate between these two contrasting explanations for misperceptions. However, in this note, we provide such a test. We take advantage of a controversy regarding the relative sizes of crowds at the presidential inaugurations of Donald Trump in 2017 and Barack Obama in 2009 to ask a question where the answer is so clear and obvious to the respondents that nobody providing an honest response should answer incorrectly. Yet, at the same time, the question taps into a salient political controversy that provides incentives for Trump supporters to engage in expressive responding. We find clear evidence of expressive responding; moreover, this behavior is especially prevalent among partisans with higher levels of political interest. Our findings provide support for the notion that at least some of the misinformation reported in surveys is the result of partisan cheerleading rather than genuinely held misperceptions.
Journal Article
Optimizing the Measurement of Sexism in Political Surveys
Political scientists are paying increasing attention to understanding the role of sexist attitudes on predicting vote choices and opinions on issues. However, the research in this area measures sexist attitudes with a variety of different items and scales. In this paper, I evaluate some of the most prominent contemporary measures of sexism and develop an approach for identifying optimal items based on (1) convergent validity, (2) predictive validity, and (3) distance from politics. I find that a subset of items from the hostile sexism scale exhibit the most desirable measurement properties and I conclude by recommending a simple two- to five-item reduced hostile sexism battery that will allow scholars to efficiently, validly, and consistently measure sexism.
Journal Article
Does Survey Mode Still Matter? Findings from a 2010 Multi-Mode Comparison
In this article, 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 Random Digit Dialing (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 using a Total Survey Error approach, 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.
Journal Article
Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism
The 2016 presidential campaign featured major-party candidates who both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney's margin over Barack Obama among that group in 2012), his advantage among non-college-educated whites was nearly 40 points. This gap between college- and noncollege educated whites was possibly the single most uniquely important divide documented in 2016.
Journal Article
Priming Gender: Campaigning on Women's Issues in U.S. Senate Elections
The gender gap has been an important feature of American elections since 1980. Yet, most explanations for the effects of gender on voting behavior focus on differences between men and women without taking account of how campaign strategies may serve to highlight or mask these differences. I examine how Senate candidates act strategically in deciding whether and how to target women voters. I find that candidates make these decisions based largely on two factors: (1) the importance of these issues to the state's voters and (2) whether gender gaps had been decisive in previous statewide contests. Analysis of exit-poll data indicates that when campaigns focused more on women's issues, women became more likely to vote Democratic while the vote choices of men were unaffected. Thus, campaign strategies do appear to influence the importance of gender differences in voting behavior.
Journal Article