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"Butler, Daniel M."
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Representing the advantaged : how politicians reinforce inequality
\"Political inequality is a major issue in American politics, with racial minorities and low-income voters receiving less favorable representation. Scholars argue that this political inequality stems largely from differences in political participation and that if all citizens participated equally we would achieve political equality. Daniel M. Butler shows that this common view is incorrect\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Do Male and Female Legislators Have Different Twitter Communication Styles?
Communication is a fundamental step in the process of political representation, and an influential stream of research hypothesizes that male and female politicians talk to their constituents in very different ways. To build the broad dataset necessary for this analysis, we harness the massive trove of communication by American politicians through Twitter. We adopt a supervised learning approach that begins with the hand coding of over 10,000 tweets and then use these to train machine learning algorithms to categorize the full corpus of over three million tweets sent by the lower house state legislators who were serving in the summer of 2017. Our results provide insights into politicians’ behavior and the consequence of women’s underrepresentation on what voters learn about legislative activity.
Journal Article
The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication
Influential theories depict politicians as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion, able to shape public opinion with persuasive appeals, or relatively unconstrained by public opinion and able to shape it merely by announcing their positions. To test these theories, we conducted unique field experiments in cooperation with sitting politicians in which U.S. state legislators sent constituents official communications with randomly assigned content. The legislators sometimes stated their issue positions in these letters, sometimes supported by extensive arguments but sometimes minimally justified; in many cases, these issue positions were at odds with voters’. An ostensibly unrelated survey found that voters often adopted the positions legislators took, even when legislators offered little justification. Moreover, voters did not evaluate their legislators more negatively when representatives took positions these voters had previously opposed, again regardless of whether legislators provided justifications. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting voters often defer to politicians’ policy judgments.
Journal Article
Ideology, Learning, and Policy Diffusion: Experimental Evidence
We introduce experimental research design to the study of policy diffusion in order to better understand how political ideology affects policymakers' willingness to learn from one another's experiences. Our two experiments–embedded in national surveys of U.S. municipal officials–expose local policymakers to vignettes describing the zoning and home foreclosure policies of other cities, offering opportunities to learn more. We find that: (1) policymakers who are ideologically predisposed against the described policy are relatively unwilling to learn from others, but (2) such ideological biases can be overcome with an emphasis on the policy's success or on its adoption by co-partisans in other communities. We also find a similar partisan-based bias among traditional ideological supporters, who are less willing to learn from those in the opposing party. The experimental approach offered here provides numerous new opportunities for scholars of policy diffusion.
Journal Article
Do Politicians Racially Discriminate Against Constituents? A Field Experiment on State Legislators
We use a field experiment to investigate whether race affects how responsive state legislators are to requests for help with registering to vote. In an email sent to each legislator, we randomized whether a putatively black or white alias was used and whether the email signaled the sender's partisan preference. Overall, we find that putatively black requests receive fewer replies. We explore two potential explanations for this discrimination: strategic partisan behavior and the legislators' own race. We find that the putatively black alias continues to be differentially treated even when the emails signal partisanship, indicating that strategic considerations cannot completely explain the observed differential treatment. Further analysis reveals that white legislators of both parties exhibit similar levels of discrimination against the black alias. Minority legislators do the opposite, responding more frequently to the black alias. Implications for the study of race and politics in the United States are discussed.
Journal Article
Recruitment and Perceptions of Gender Bias in Party Leader Support
Gender differences in who gets recruited by political party elites contribute to women's underrepresentation on the ballot, but recent evidence suggests that even when women are recruited to the same extent as men, they are still less likely to be interested in seeking office. Why do men and women respond differently to invitations to seek office? We hypothesize that women view party recruitment as a weaker signal of informal support than men do. We use a survey experiment on a sample of 3,640 elected municipal officeholders—themselves prospective recruits for higher office—to test this. We find that female respondents generally believe party leaders will provide female recruits less strategic and financial support than male recruits. In other words, even when elites recruit women, women are skeptical that party leaders will use their political and social capital on their behalf. This difference may account for many women's lukewarm responses to recruitment.
Journal Article
Understanding the Party Brand: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Valence
The valence component of a party’s reputation, or brand, has been less scrutinized than other components of party-based theories of legislatures. This lack of scrutiny results from the difficulty of isolating the valence component from policy-related components and the difficulty of studying legislators’ motives. We overcome these challenges by conducting survey experiments on both voters and state legislators that show (1) that scholars have underestimated the impact of the party valence brand’s potential role in elections, (2) that legislative party leaders pressure members more on votes when the outcome affects the party valence brand, and (3) that the value of the party brand can sometimes directly affect legislators’ votes. Our results provide a rationale for why legislative leaders put so much effort into media spin battles and suggest that parties’ reputations affect legislative leaders’ ability to pass their agenda.
Journal Article
Facilitating Field Experiments at the Subnational Level
Field experiments are a growing part of the research political scientists conduct. Several features make the subnational level an attractive place to conduct field experiments, particularly experiments designed to test for information effects. In this essay I discuss several ways to facilitate further field experimentation. I end the essay with a series of suggestions on how researchers can find partners interested in collaborating on conducting field experiments.
Journal Article
How Politicians Discount the Opinions of Constituents with Whom They Disagree
We argue that politicians systematically discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree and that this \"disagreement discounting\" is a contributing factor to ideological incongruence. A pair of survey experiments where state and local politicians are the subjects of interest show that public officials rationalize this behavior by assuming that constituents with opposing views are less informed about the issue. This finding applies both to well-established issues that divide the parties as well as to nonpartisan ones. Further, it cannot be explained by politicians' desires to favor the opinions of either copartisans or likely voters. A third survey experiment using a sample of voters shows that the bias is exacerbated by an activity central to representative governance—taking and explaining one's policy positions. This suggests that the job of being a representative exacerbates this bias.
Journal Article
An Empirical Justification for the Use of Racially Distinctive Names to Signal Race in Experiments
Researchers studying discrimination and bias frequently conduct experiments that use racially distinctive names to signal race. The ability of these experiments to speak to racial discrimination depends on the excludability assumption that subjects’ responses to these names are driven by their reaction to the individual’s putative race and not some other factor. We use results from an audit study with a large number of aliases and data from detailed public records to empirically test the excludability assumption undergirding the use of racially distinctive names. The detailed public records allow us to measure the signals about socioeconomic status and political resources that each name used in the study possibly could send. We then reanalyze the audit study to see whether these signals predict legislators’ likelihood of responding. We find no evidence that politicians respond to this other information, thus providing empirical support for the excludability assumption.
Journal Article