This paper asks whether a high-profile focusing event — the murder of George Floyd — changed citizens’ political behavior by bringing new prospective voters into the system. Using nationwide voter file data for the United States, the authors apply a regression discontinuity in time design and provide replication code for their analysis. They focus on changes in new voter registrations around the event and examine how effects vary across subgroups.
Do voters punish women legislators for failing to support women’s substantive policy interests? The authors test whether voters hold gendered expectations—expecting women lawmakers to champion women's issues more than men—and whether those expectations affect electoral evaluations.
Religious sects and strict denominations are growing faster and retaining members better than mainstream faiths. This study asks: can a sect compel all members to "vote as one" and deliver a full slate of endorsed national candidates? The evidence shows a strikingly large effect.
This paper asks whether a town‑hall style, deliberative campaign—where candidates discuss platforms with small groups of citizens—causally affects voting in a congressional election. Using a randomized experiment run with two national parties in the Philippines, the authors estimate whether active, discussion‑based outreach changes parties' vote shares relative to standard, passive campaign approaches.
This article asks whether voter bias helps explain the near absence of politicians who are publicly HIV-positive. Using original nationally representative survey experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the authors estimate how voters respond to hypothetical candidates with HIV and explore explanations for any observed penalty.
Using the 2016 American National Election Study, the authors examine how Americans’ perceptions of immigrant threat and the strength of their American identity jointly relate to vote choice in the 2016 presidential election. Grounded in social identity theory, the paper tests whether perceptions of immigrant threat are more likely to translate into support for Donald Trump among those with stronger American identity, and conversely whether American identity’s effects on vote choice are activated by threat perceptions. With survey data from ANES, the authors report that immigrant-threat perceptions and American identity magnify each other’s effects: threat perceptions have larger associations with support for Trump among respondents with stronger American identity, and American identity has stronger associations with vote choice when respondents perceive greater immigrant threat.
Recent shifts in voter behavior and evolving campaign strategies have fueled doubts about traditional structural forecasting models. These models rely on fundamental variables like demographics, historical voting patterns, and socioeconomic factors to predict election outcomes months ahead of the actual vote.