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AbstractTheories of democratic politics prize congruence between citizens' preferences and their elected representatives' actions in office. Elections are a critical means for achieving such policy congruence, providing voters the opportunity to chasten representatives who are out of step with constituent preferences and to reward the faithful. Do voters act this way? Recent studies based on observational data find they do, but these data are somewhat limited. We employ a survey experiment to estimate the extent to which information about policy congruence affects voters' evaluations of representatives. We informed some subjects how often their member of Congress's voting decisions match their own stated preferences on the same policies. We find that information about congruence enhances accountability by affecting constituent evaluations of representatives and may also affect citizens' propensity to participate in upcoming elections.

While the popularity of using the item count technique (ICT) or list experiment to obtain estimates of attitudes and behaviors subject to social desirability bias has increased in recent years among political scientists, many of the empirical properties of the technique remain untested. In this paper, we explore whether estimates are biased due to the different list lengths provided to control and treatment groups rather than due to the substance of the treatment items. By using face-to-face survey data from national probability samples of households in Uruguay and Honduras, we assess how effective the ICT is in the context of face-to-face surveys-where social desirability bias should be strongest-and in developing contexts-where literacy rates raise questions about the capability of respondents to engage in cognitively taxing process required by ICT. We find little evidence that the ICT overestimates the incidence of behaviors and instead find that the ICT provides extremely conservative estimates of high incidence behaviors. Thus, the ICT may be more useful for detecting low prevalence attitudes and behaviors and may overstate social desirability bias when the technique is used for higher frequency socially desirable attitudes and behaviors. However, we do not find strong evidence of variance in deflationary effects across common demographic subgroups, suggesting that multivariate estimates using the ICT may not be biased. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractIn order to encouragee broad participation in deliberative forums, it is important to understand how people from politically less powerful groups perceive the deliberative experience and how discussion group composition affects their experiences. Using data from 27 deliberative polls from 2004, we examine how four individual characteristics (sex, age, race, and education) and randomly assigned small group composition predict participants' attitudes about the deliberative experience. We find evidence that women, young people, non-whites, and those without college degree generally evaluate the experience positively, but find no evidence for the argument that including more people from these groups would lead to more positive deliberation experience for participants from the groups. That is, there is no interaction between minority status and group composition in predicting participants' evaluation of the deliberation process.

AbstractCan state officials increase local officials' compliance with an important federal civil rights law with subtle interventions? The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires voter registration services at certain government agencies, but many counties fail to comply with the act. Working with officials in two states, the authors conducted field experiments to determine whether two methods commonly used by state officials increase compliance with the NVRA. Findings show that although the effects of the methods on output were sizable relative to recent performance, agency performance remained poor overall, with many offices continuing their history of registering no voters. The authors also discovered that gains in performance were largest for the offices that had performed best in the past. These findings suggest that while subtle interventions by state officials can produce increased compliance, stronger tactics may be needed to secure implementation of this federal law by local government agents.

Political parties have recently rediscovered grassroots tactics for voter mobilization. The only solid evidence for the effectiveness of such get-out-the-vote (GOTV) tactics is based upon non-partisan field experiments that may not accurately capture the effectiveness of partisan campaign outreach. In order to address this lacuna, during the 2002 Michigan gubernatorial election, a large field experiment across 14 state house districts evaluated the cost effectiveness of three mobilization technologies utilized by the Michigan Democratic Party's Youth Coordinated Campaign: door hangers, volunteer phone calls, and face-to-face visits. Contrary to past non-partisan experiments, our results indicate that all three GOTV strategies possess similar cost-effectiveness.

Although elections have become the norm not only in democratic regimes but also in autocratic ones, the legitimacy of the electoral process in different countries is often contested. Facing strong international pressures to prove democratic credentials, eventual winners have a strong incentive to ensure high levels of voter turnout. Conversely, leaders of parties likely to lose the election have an incentive to reduce turnout—for example, through boycotts—to delegitimize the election. In such situations, turnout is a major dimension of competition. To overcome the potential delegitimizing effects of low turnout, incumbents will often turn toward clientelistic mobilization, as high turnout can be a powerful rejoinder to those who denounce elections as a sham and can put observers' concerns about the legitimacy of the electoral process to rest. We develop a theory to explain how such campaigns will target particularistic benefits. We argue that what we term "legitimacy buying" will be primarily aimed at "staunching the bleeding" of supporters who are usually consistent voters but have doubts about the legitimacy of the election. This theoretical prediction departs from theories used to explain vote buying in contexts in which the legitimacy of the elections is largely uncontested by significant groups in society. The theory is supported by data from a list experiment on vote buying conducted after the Honduran 2009 elections, which occurred in the wake of President Zelaya's ousting and in the midst of a boycott promoted by his supporters.

Anti-vote-buying campaigns led by NGOs and political elites denounce the practice as a crass economic transaction detrimental to democracy. Do potential clients stigmatize vote buying to the same degree, or does the mass public have a more conditional view of the acceptability of vote buying? We theorize that normative evaluations of vote buying vary based on individuals' understanding of the transaction itself and abstract societal costs associated with the practice. We assess this perspective using survey experiments conducted in several Latin American countries that present hypothetical vote-buying situations for evaluation by respondents, varying the socioeconomic status of the hypothetical client and the client's political predispositions. We find that the disapproval of vote buying is highly conditional on the attributes of the hypothetical client and that evaluations of vote buying depend on conceptions of the concrete benefits and abstract costs of vote buying as a part of electoral politics. Adapted from the source document.