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AbstractObjectiveKnowledge on anti‐semitism and its effects as an attitude is limited. We seek to assess its relationship with other out‐group measures and its predictive ability on political judgments. We seek to (a) study the properties of a measure of anti‐semitism; (b) explore the relationship between anti‐semitism and other frequently used measures of out‐group attitudes; (c) assess the key demographic predictors of endorsement of anti‐semitic beliefs; (d) evaluate the predictive ability of our measure of anti‐semitism in models predicting support for the QAnon conspiracy theory and vote for Trump in the 2020 election.Data and MethodsThis study utilizes two national online surveys fielded in January and August 2020 that are weighted to match the U.S. population. We utilize a Bayesian factor analytic approach to assess the relationship between various out‐group measures. We also use regression analyses to predict the correlates of anti‐semitism and to test the relationship between anti‐semitism and support for QAnon and for Trump.ResultsOur results show that anti‐semitism shares more variance with xenophobia than anti‐black prejudice suggesting that people tend to perceive Jews as national outsiders not as racial others. Furthermore, anti‐semitism is a strong positive predictor of both support for QAnon and intent to vote for Donald Trump.

How do voters make decisions in low-information contests? Although some research has looked at low-information voter decision making, scant research has focused on data from actual ballots cast in low-information elections. We focus on three 2008 Pierce County (Washington) Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. Using individual-level ballot image data, we evaluate the structure of individual rankings for specific contests to determine whether partisan cues underlying partisan rankings are correlated with choices made in nonpartisan races. This is the first time that individual-level data from real elections have been used to evaluate the role of partisan cues in nonpartisan races. We find that, in partisan contests, voters make avid use of partisan cues in constructing their preference rankings, rank-ordering candidates based on the correspondence between voters' own partisan preferences and candidates' reported partisan affiliation. However, in nonpartisan contests where candidates have no explicit partisan affiliation, voters rely on cues other than partisanship to develop complete candidate rankings.

The authors analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election using a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows a new perspective of convenience voting. Most importantly, they make clear distinctions among the major forms of convenience voting and demonstrate that not all "convenience voters" share the same attributes. In addition, the authors find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications, despite the differences among mail, early, and election-day voters. Results like these have important implications for future moves toward convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns. Adapted from the source document.

The authors analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election using a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows a new perspective of convenience voting. Most importantly, they make clear distinctions among the major forms of convenience voting and demonstrate that not all "convenience voters" share the same attributes. In addition, the authors find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications, despite the differences among mail, early, and election-day voters. Results like these have important implications for future moves toward convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns.

AbstractBuilding on past research, we implement a hierarchical latent class model to analyze political participation from a comparative perspective. Our methodology allows simultaneously: (i) estimating citizens' propensity to engage in conventional and unconventional modes of participation; (ii) classifying individuals into underlying "types" capturing within- and cross-country variations in participation; and (iii) assessing how this classification varies with micro- and macro-level factors. We apply our model to Latin American survey data. We show that our method outperforms alternative approaches used to study participation and derive typologies of political engagement. Substantively, we find that the distribution of participatory types is similar throughout the continent, and that it correlates strongly with respondents' socio-demographic characteristics and crime victimization.

Election campaigns in modern democracies are increasingly affected by the rise of Internet-based information and communication technologies. Here, one of the most significant developments concerns the rapidly spreading 'voting advice applications' (VAAs). VAAs help online users to find their parties by matching a series of party positions with the positions taken up by the users themselves. This article analyses whether such tailor-made campaign information affects the party preferences of voters. It hypothesizes that the impact of the VAA-produced information is dependent on the 'representative deficit', a concept which captures the part of political preferences of a user that are not reflected by any party in the political system. The empirical analysis is conducted using a dataset stemming from users of the 'EU Profiler', a VAA produced for the 2009 European Parliamentary elections campaign. We find that less than one out of five users matches best with her initially preferred party. While a large majority of those users who are advised to vote for a better-fitting party are hardly affected by the VAA output, 8 percent of these do change their first preference to the party proposed by the VAA. Switching party preferences can be explained by the size of the representative deficit: the higher the deficit, the lower the probability that the initial party preference will be changed. This finding shows that users of VAAs are responsive to the match calculated by the online tool. They do not blindly follow the personalized suggestions but do so only when they are shown convincing levels of overlap between their views and the best-ranked party's positions.

Voting technologies frame the voting experience. Different ways of presenting information to voters, registering voter choices and counting ballots may change the voting experience and cause individuals to re-evaluate the legitimacy of the electoral process. Yet few field experiments have evaluated how voting technologies affect the voting experience. This article uses unique data from a recent e-voting field experiment in Salta, Argentina to study these questions. It employs propensity-score matching methods to measure the causal effect of replacing traditional voting technology with e-voting on the voting experience. The study's main finding is that while e-voters perceive the new technology as easier to use and more likely to register votes as intended—and support replacing traditional voting technologies with e-voting—the new technologies also raise some concerns about ballot secrecy.

Does attentiveness matter in survey responses? Do more attentive survey participants give higher quality responses? Using data from a recent online survey that identified inattentive respondents using instructed-response items, we demonstrate that ignoring attentiveness provides a biased portrait of the distribution of critical political attitudes and behavior. We show that this bias occurs in the context of both typical closed-ended questions and in list experiments. Inattentive respondents are common and are more prevalent among the young and less educated. Those who do not pass the trap questions interact with the survey instrument in distinctive ways: they take less time to respond; are more likely to report nonattitudes; and display lower consistency in their reported choices. Inattentiveness does not occur completely at random and failing to properly account for it may lead to inaccurate estimates of the prevalence of key political attitudes and behaviors, of both sensitive and more prosaic nature.