Independent Voters Research Articles

The Gendered Politics of Congressional Elections

Are female candidates less likely than male candidates to attract votes or win elections? We conduct a large-n longitudinal analysis employing survey and observational data from every two-party congressional race over a 12-year period (2006–2018) and connect individual-level theory and evidence with aggregate-level results. We demonstrate that candidate gender significantly influences congressional vote-choice and election outcomes. Holding other variables constant, we show that male Republican and male independent voters are significantly less likely to vote for female Democratic candidates, but do not assess a similar penalty on female Republican candidates. Perceived ideological distance does not explain the lack of support for female Democrats—however, variation in candidate quality does: Female Democratic candidates can attract the support of male Republican and male independent voters when they have a qualifications advantage, but are penalized when they are merely “as qualified.” At the aggregate-level, female Democratic candidates with a qualifications advantage are as likely as males to win elections; but are significantly less likely than males to win when qualifications are held constant. The proportion of male Republicans and male independents in a district determines the extent of the penalty, with women’s electoral prospects declining as this proportion increases. Women can win, but they need to be highly qualified and strategic about the races in which they emerge. These findings contribute to our understanding of the micro- and macro-level factors that shape women’s electoral fortunes; and advance the goal of representational equality by helping candidates and campaigns concentrate their efforts on the most winnable voters and districts.

Taking cues from the government: heuristic versus systematic processing in a constitutional referendum

One of the main criticisms of direct democracy is that it places excessive demands on voters. Are citizens competent enough to vote directly on policy issues? When stakes are high, do citizens mainly follow elites’ signals or do they decide in line with their issue preferences? This article addresses these questions in a multi-method setting by combining observational and experimental data from an original three-wave panel survey conducted during the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. In particular, Finite Mixture Models are employed to model voters’ heterogeneous strategies of information processing. Findings show that heuristic voting based on government evaluation prevails over policy-related voting. More specifically, less politically sophisticated and partisan voters relied on government assessment as a heuristic, while sophisticated and independent voters based their decisions mostly on their assessment of the reform. Implications for the question of citizens’ competence in direct democracy are discussed.

With 16 Months to go, Negative Partisanship Predicts the 2020 Presidential Election

American elections have become increasingly nationalized and highly predictable; with partisanship serving as an identity-based, dominant vote determinant for all but a small portion of Americans. Rather than a relatively fixed pool of voters rewarding or punishing the parties for their platforms or performance in office like elections of the past, the two party’s electoral fortunes rise and fall with the ebb and flow of turnout among key elements of their increasingly fixed coalitions; mobilized or demobilized by gaining or losing control of the presidency. Voters from the party out-of-power, galvanized to vote by negative partisanship, increase their turnout in subsequent elections, while turnout from the party in-power wanes due to complacency. The electoral performance of the opposition party is also improved by the predictable movement of pure Independent voters away from the party in power due the hyper-partisan and highly-charged negative political environment. The size of the “swing” of pure Independents is conditioned on economic conditions or on other “shocks” to the political system such as unpopular wars or unpopular incumbent presidents. The Negative Partisanship model predicted the Democrat's 40 seat House gain four months before Election Day in the 2018 Midterms. The 2020 forecast currently shows Democrats recapturing the White House with 278 Electoral College votes, including the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Taiwan’s Politics 2018: The Dilemma of the Movement Government

Declining Taiwanese nationalism, rising independent voters and more realistic public perception of democracy had contributed to the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) electoral debacle in 2018. The structural dilemma of the DPP administration as a movement government significantly contributed to its rapidly declining public support. The DPP administration had to keep a delicate balance by compromising on its promises to various social movement and progressive forces after it took power, which consequently alienated many of its supporters.

When collective ignorance is bliss: Theory and experiment on voting for learning

When do groups and societies choose to be uninformed? We study a committee that needs to vote on a reform which will give every member a private state-dependent payoff. The committee can vote to learn the state at no cost. We show that the committee votes not to learn the state whenever independent voters are more divided than partisans. This implies that groups with conflicting preferences tend to seek less information. A laboratory experiment shows that committees are substantially more likely to vote against acquiring information when the theory predicts them to do so. We also observe deviations from theory that are largely explained by cognitive limitations. At the same time, subjects with more experience or with greater strategic competence are more likely to vote in line with the theory, providing evidence for external validity of the model.

MOVEMENT-COUNTERMOVEMENT DYNAMICS AND MOBILIZING THE ELECTORATE*

Social movements draw attention to how their goals align with political candidates but also intensify tensions in local settings. These tensions can take the form of oppositional voter mobilization when the movement is perceived as a formidable threat. In this article, I argue that protest signals the potential for electoral victory, and that the mobilization of opposing voters results when countermovement organizations frame the potential for victory as threatening to voter's interests. I provide empirical support by examining Senate voting outcomes in the 2010 midterm election and show that increases in Democratic voting were most pronounced in counties with high Tea Party rally activity. In complementary analyses, I find that Independent voters are more likely to oppose the Tea Party in counties with higher rally activity, and this opposition increased their likelihood of voting for Democrats.

The Contingent Effects of Candidate Sex on Voter Choice

A prominent explanation for why women are significantly underrepresented in public office in the U.S. is that stereotypes lead voters to favor male candidates over female candidates. Yet whether voters actually use a candidate’s sex as a voting heuristic in the presence of other common information about candidates remains a surprisingly unsettled question. Using a conjoint experiment that controls for stereotypes, we show that voters are biased against female candidates but in some unexpected ways. The average effect of a candidate’s sex on voter decisions is small in magnitude, is limited to presidential rather than congressional elections, and appears only among male voters. More importantly, independent voters display the greatest negative bias against female candidates. The results suggest that partisanship works as a kind of “insurance” for voters who can be sure that the party affiliation of the candidate will represent their views in office regardless of the sex of the candidate.

Effects of the Media, Economy, and Independent Voters on Post-War Japanese Prime Ministers’ General Policy Speeches

Effects of the Media, Economy, and Independent Voters on Post-War Japanese Prime Ministers’ General Policy Speeches

The 2015 Qualitative Election Study of Britain

The Qualitative Election Study of Britain (qesb) is the first (and only) qualitative longitudinal dataset to investigate political attitudes and voting behaviour over multiple elections and referendums in the United Kingdom. During the 2015ukgeneral election over 90 voters participated in 23 focus groups across England, Scotland, and Wales before and after polling day. These participants represented a range of political party supporters and independent voters, age groups, and economic backgrounds. They discussed a range of political issues including their vote choice in the election, their impressions of the major party leaders, why they would consider voting (or never voting) for a political party, and their expectations for the country moving forward. Special focus groups were also held around the three leaders’ debates. The 2015qesbalso brought back participants who had participated in the 2010qesbfocus groups and the 2014 Scottish referendum focus groups. The 2015qesbhas created a unique panel of participants whose political opinions can be tracked across multiple elections. The project also includes questions that were asked in prior election focus groups and has replicated, with some modifications, the research design of the previous wave of the study.

Independent Voters in Political Contexts: A Comparative Study of the Presidential Elections in South Korea and the United States

Independent Voters in Political Contexts: A Comparative Study of the Presidential Elections in South Korea and the United States

Ensembling over-segmentations: From weak evidence to strong segmentation

Due to the high diversity of image data, image segmentation is still a very challenging problem after decades of development. Each segmentation algorithm has its merits as well as its drawbacks. Instead of segmenting images via conventional techniques, inspired by the idea of the ensemble clustering technique that combines a set of weak clusterers to obtain a strong clusterer, we propose to achieve a consensus segmentation by fusing evidence accumulated from multiple weak segmentations (or over-segmentations). We present a novel image segmentation approach which exploits multiple over-segmentations and achieves segmentation results by hierarchical region merging. The cross-region evidence accumulation (CREA) mechanism is designed for collecting information among over-segmentations. The pixel-pairs across regions are treated as a bag of independent voters and the cumulative votes from multiple over-segmentations are fused to estimate the coherency of adjacent regions. We further integrate the brightness, color, and texture cues for measuring the appearance similarity between regions in an over-segmentation, which, together with the CREA information, are utilized for making the region merging decisions. Experiments are conducted on multiple public datasets, which demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency when compared to the state-of-the-art.

The Changing Independent Voters in American Politics

The Changing Independent Voters in American Politics

Neither Red Nor Blue: The Influence of Independent Voters in Massachusetts

In a time when candidates feel pressure to tout their independent attitude and bipartisan spirit in order to win elections, the growing presence of the independent political mindset among voters cannot be ignored. Massachusetts is a perfect microcosm through which to explore the influence of independent voters. The perception of Massachusetts as a predominantly blue state in which Democratic candidates dominate is misleading. While this is true of the legislature, the electorate of the Bay State is over one-half independent, giving Massachusetts the largest proportion of independent voters in the United States. This piece explores how a predominantly independent constituency elects a predominantly single-party legislature. Using registration and election data as well as first-hand accounts from Massachusetts legislators, this article seeks to uncover how the indpendent voter fits into America's dominant two-party system. In this process, it confronts questions on the merit of the two-party system as well as the identity of the American voter.

The Popularity of Governors, Electoral Incentives and State Tax Policy

How does the political popularity of a sitting governor affect that incumbent’s tax policy choices? In this paper, I discuss whether, and by what degree, a governor’s popularity affects his or her tax policies between 1970 and 2010. The results show that high levels of popularity may induce governors to act contrary to the interests of independent voters. I find that popular Democratic governors have more incentives to increase corporate taxes, while popular Republican governors are likely to raise sales taxes. Further analysis suggests that popular term-limited governors are more likely to increase total taxes than their counterparts who are eligible for reelection. In addition to explaining the role of popularity in incumbents’ policy choices, these findings improve our understanding of the interaction between voters’ behavior and political attitudes of public officials in representative democracy.

Effective group size of majority vote accuracy in sequential decision-making

We investigate a sequential decision-making situation wherein, with a certain probability, each voter imitates the decision of another voter who has already made a decision; otherwise, she makes a decision independently. After all individuals reach decisions, the group decision is determined using the simple majority rule. To evaluate the collective performance in this situation, we introduce the concept of effective group size, which measures how many independent voters are needed to obtain the same majority vote accuracy realized by non-independent sequential votes. We have found the deterioration of majority vote accuracy by imitation behavior of voters, and quantified it by a decrease in the effective group size. We argue that this decline in the majority vote accuracy is caused by the two factors: a decrease in the number of independent voters and an increase in the disparity of influences of voters on succeeding voters’ decisions.

Balancing the ticket while appealing to the base

Our paper addresses why a moderate presidential candidate would select an extreme running mate, as was the case in the 2012 US presidential election. To address this question, we designed a one-dimensional policy game in which a moderate challenger uses their vice-presidential candidate as a policy tool to alter the median voter participating in the election. Our main conclusion is that the median voter is altered through a mobilization effect, by increasing own party turnout through the convincing of the more extreme segment of a party to participate in the election, rather than altering the voter’s decision to vote for a particular candidate. This decision function only has a marginal effect on independent voters. Our conclusion is in line with recent empirical advances in the literature and our paper aims to more formally ground these advancements in theory. We developed a set of comparative statics to apply the theory of running mate selection more broadly, germane beyond the case of the 2012 presidential election used to frame this topic. Our model also determines the optimal difference between the platforms of a challenger and their vice-presidential candidate.

Goldwater, Bush, Ryan and the Failed Attempts by Conservative Republicans to Reform Federal Entitlement Programs

Social Security and Medicare are federal entitlement programs that represent the current of modern liberalism in the United States. The countercurrent of conservatism has been represented by some Republican politicians who have tried to reform these programs. 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater suggested making Social Security voluntary. In 2005 President George W. Bush made partial privatization of Social Security a key component of his second-term domestic agenda. From 2010 to 2012 Congressman Paul Ryan advocated a reform of Medicare in which the federal government would give seniors vouchers to buy private insurance. Each of these proposals backfired. When conservative Republicans propose detailed alterations to the pillars of some of the Democratic Party’s main legislative accomplishments in the 20th century, they disaffect moderates and independent voters, and they fuel the liberal base of the Democratic Party. The proposals are a liability for Republicans in national elections because Americans fear that entitlement reform will jeopardize the benefits they receive.

Forms of Expression of Angry Voters and Sad Voters: The Effects of Discrete Emotions and Emotional Expression on the Voting Participation through Approach-Avoidance Action Tendencies

Despite the proliferation of studies on emotion, little attention has been paid to the effects of discrete emotion on political participation. Using a representative survey conducted on a sample of South Korean citizens in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry accident, the current survey explored how anger and sadness, as well as the ways people express those emotions, influence the orientation of their response in social environments and, ultimately, their voting intention. The results partially supported the discrete effects of sadness and anger in eliciting reactions of approach or avoidance. Anger was found to provoke an approach action tendency in independent voters and supporters of the opposition, while also eliciting an avoidance action tendency with a varying effect size across all three groups of respondents. Sadness also prompted an approach action tendency in independents and supporters of the incumbent party, while it manifested a negative association with the avoidance action tendency in supporters of the opponent party. An interpretation of the findings and proposed directions for future research are presented.

Presidentialization of Japanese Politics? Examining Political Leader Evaluations and Vote Choice

AbstractIn recent years, the impact of party leaders on voting behavior has attracted increasing attention, leading some scholars to identify a phenomenon of ‘presidentialization’. Many extant studies of this topic in Japan are limited to one or two electoral cycles. In order to trace long-term trends, this paper analyses longitudinal survey data to investigate the existence and magnitude of the effect party leader evaluations exert on vote choice in Japan. Empirical results show that while only dominant and forceful personalities substantially influenced voters' likelihood of supporting their parties in the 1980s and 1990s, by the 2000s assessments of most major party leaders had a significant impact on their parties' electoral performance. In short, party leaders affect vote choice due not to their personalities, but instead to the position they hold. We also test the hypotheses that the association between leader appraisal and voting behavior would be particularly conspicuous among voters who lack party identification and those who are most heavily exposed to media reportage. Analysis reveals that (1) independent voters are not more likely to vote on the basis of leader evaluations than partisans; (2) a leader effect is found more frequently among voters with greater exposure to election coverage on television.

From the Secret Ballot to the Public Vote: Examining Voters’ Experience of Political Discussion in Vote-by-Mail Elections

Considerable research on political discussion has focused on identifying its antecedents and outcomes. The rise of voting by mail provides an opportunity to examine the subject in a new context—one in which voters discuss their views and electoral choices with others while filling out their ballots. We explored the possibility that conventional predictors of political engagement would predict who partakes in such discussions. Past research also suggested that those voters most likely to report changing their minds as a result of discussion would perceive their discussants as holding contrary views and higher levels of political sophistication. We further hypothesized that less politically engaged voters would seek out discussants they rated as more knowledgeable than themselves, whereas the more politically sophisticated voters would seek out like-minded discussants. Past research also suggested that the least partisan voters would be those most likely to report disagreement in their absentee discussions. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed telephone survey data from two elections conducted in Washington State. Results showed that the factors that predict traditional forms of political participation and discussion do not explain who engages in discussion during vote-by-mail elections. We also found that independent voters were more likely to talk with ideologically divergent discussants, whereas less knowledgeable citizens sought discussants who knew more about politics than they did. Many voters reported that these discussions shaped their vote choices, with the highest rates of perceived influence coming from those who viewed their discussion partners as more knowledgeable and more ideologically divergent.