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Do small but wealthy interest groups influence referendums, ballot initiatives, and other forms of direct legislation at the expense of the broader public interest? Many observers argue that they do, often lamenting that direct legislation has, paradoxically, been captured by the very same wealthy interests whose power it was designed to curb. Elisabeth Gerber, however, challenges that argument. In this first systematic study of how money and interest group power actually affect direct legislation, she reveals that big spending does not necessarily mean big influence. Gerber bases her findings on extensive surveys of the activities and motivations of interest groups and on close examination of campaign finance records from 168 direct legislation campaigns in eight states. Her research confirms what such wealthy interests as the insurance industry, trial lawyer associations, and tobacco companies have learned by defeats at the ballot box: if citizens do not like a proposed new law, even an expensive, high-profile campaign will not make them change their mind. She demonstrates, however, that these economic interest groups have considerable success in using direct legislation to block initiatives that others are proposing and to exert pressure on politicians. By contrast, citizen interest groups with broad-based support and significant organizational resources have proven to be extremely effective in using direct legislation to pass new laws. Clearly written and argued, this is a major theoretical and empirical contribution to our understanding of the role of citizens and organized interests in the American legislative process.

There is much concern among pundits and political observers that incivility undermines our electoral process. Yet we have little evidence that actually documents whether incivility has such pernicious effects. This article seeks to advance our understanding of the influence of incivility on the electorate. We argue that three dimensions are central to understanding both the perceptions and effects of different types of campaign messages: tone (negative versus positive); civility (civil versus uncivil); and focus (issue versus trait-based message content). Using an experimental manipulation on a large national sample that examines these three dimensions, we find that uncivil attacks in campaigns do not appear to be as worrisome as its detractors fear. While uncivil messages in general-and uncivil trait-based messages in particular-are usually seen by the public as being less fair, less informative, and less important than both their civil negative and positive counterparts, they are no more likely to lead to detrimental effects among the public. In fact, incivility appears to have some modest positive consequences for the political engagement of the electorate. These findings are important, since attacks and counterattacks will continue to shape the American political landscape.

Politicians routinely appeal to the emotions of voters, a practice critics claim subverts the rational decision making on which democratic processes properly rest. But we know little about how emotional appeals actually influence voting behavior. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that political ads can change the way citizens get involved and make choices simply by using images and music to evoke emotions. Prior research suggests voters behave differently in different emotional states but has not established whether politicians can use campaigns to manipulate emotions and thereby cause changes in political behavior. This article uses two experiments conducted during an actual election to show that: (1) cueing enthusiasm motivates participation and activates existing loyalties; and (2) cueing fear stimulates vigilance, increases reliance on contemporary evaluations, and facilitates persuasion. These results suggest campaigns achieve their goals in part by appealing to emotions, and emotional appeals can promote democratically desirable behavior.

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do seemingly arbitrary features of survey interviews affect their validity? Our answer comes from experiments embedded in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group was asked political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Treatment groups received the questions in altered contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering the questions correctly. Another was given extra time. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11-24%. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents' recall of political facts with variation in their motivation to exert effort during survey interviews. Our work also suggests that existing measures fail to capture relevant political search skills and, hence, provide unreliable assessments of what many citizens know when they make political decisions. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate people's capacities for informed decision making.

One of the most prominent claims to emerge from the field of public opinion is that citizens can vote for candidates whose issue positions best reflect their own beliefs even when they cannot remember previously learned stances associated with the candidates. The current experiment provides a unique and powerful examination of this claim by determining whether individuals with profound amnesia, whose severe memory impairments prevent them from remembering specific issue information associated with any particular candidate, can vote for candidates whose issue positions come closest to their own political views. We report here that amnesic patients, despite not being able to remember any issue information, consistently voted for candidates with favored political positions. Thus, sound voting decisions do not require recall or recognition of previously learned associations between candidates and their issue positions. This result supports a multiple memory systems model of political decision making.

While the effects of legal and institutional arrangements on political participation are well documented, little attention has been given to the potential participatory effects of one of the United States' most important electoral laws: constitutionally mandated reapportionment. By severing the ties between constituents and their incumbents, we argue, redistricting raises information costs, leading to increased levels of nonvoting in U.S. House contests. Survey data from the 1992 American National Election Studies show that redrawn citizens are half as likely to know their incumbent's name as citizens who remain in a familiar incumbent's district and, consequently, significantly more likely to roll off, or abstain from voting in the House election after having cast a presidential vote. We also show that participation rates in the 2002-2006 House elections in Texas—each of which followed a redistricting—match these patterns, with roll-off increasing 3% to 8% in portions of the state that were redrawn, controlling for other factors. The findings demonstrate that scholars and policy makers ought to be concerned with the extent to which the redrawing of congressional lines affects citizens' exercise of political voice.

Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.

Since the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, social scientists have rediscovered a long tradition of research examining the effects of ballot format on voting. Using a new dataset collected by The New York Times, we investigate the causal effect of being listed on the first ballot page in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. California law mandates a unique randomization procedure of ballot order that, when appropriately modeled, can be used to approximate a classical randomized experiment in a real world setting. We apply randomization inference based on Fisher's exact test, which directly incorporates the exact randomization procedure and yields accurate nonparametric confidence intervals. Our results suggest that being listed on the first ballot page causes a statistically significant increase in vote shares for more than 40% of the minor candidates, whereas there is no significant effect for the top two candidates. We also investigate how randomization inference differs from conventional estimators that do not fully incorporate California's complex treatment assignment mechanism. The results indicate appreciable differences between the two approaches.

BackgroundThis study uses an online survey panel to compare two approaches for assessing ad awareness. The first uses a screenshot of a television ad and the second shows participants a full-length video of the ad.MethodsWe randomly assigned 1034 Minnesota respondents to view a screenshot or a streaming video from two antitobacco ads. The study used one ad from ClearWay Minnesota's We All Pay the Price campaign, and one from the Centers for Disease Control Tips campaign. The key measure used to assess ad awareness was aided ad recall. Multivariate analyses of recall with cessation behaviour and attitudinal beliefs assessed the validity of these approaches.ResultsThe respondents who saw the video reported significantly higher recall than those who saw the screenshot. Associations of recall with cessation behaviour and attitudinal beliefs were stronger and in the anticipated direction using the screenshot method. Over 20% of the respondents assigned to the video group could not see the ad. People who were under 45 years old, had incomes greater than $35 000 and women were reportedly less able to access the video.ConclusionsThe methodology used to assess recall matters. Campaigns may exaggerate the successes or failures of their media campaigns, depending on the approach they employ and how they compare it to other media campaign evaluations. When incorporating streaming video, researchers should consider accessibility and report possible response bias. Researchers should fully define the measures they use, specify any viewing accessibility issues, and make ad comparisons only when using comparable methods.

After the death of William H. Hudnut, III, on December 18, 2016, Indiana Magazine of History editor Eric Sandweiss interviewed Senator Richard Lugar about his memories of Hudnut. Bill Hudnut moved to Indianapolis in 1964 to become pastor of Second Presbyterian Church. In 1972, he began his political career with one term in the U.S. Congress and then became mayor of Indianapolis, serving from 1976 to 1992. Lugar reflected on his early political contacts with Hudnut, while Lugar was still Indianapolis's mayor, and then commented extensively on Hudnut's career as mayor, in particular his plans for developing the city's downtown area and transforming Indianapolis into the “amateur sports capital of the world.”