Suchergebnisse

Recent partisan claims about the illegitimacy of the 2020 election highlight a need to better understand the determinants underlying Americans' trust in the electoral process. In this study, we focus on African Americans and conservatives, two groups that stand out both historically and contemporaneously for high levels of distrust in elections. Utilizing nationally representative survey data, we analyze the degree to which election distrust is associated with respondents' attitudes towards policies addressing voter access (photo ID requirements, vote by-mail, and felon voting), perceptions of disenfranchisement, and their personal experience while voting. We find evidence that distrust is not tied to one's personal voting experience, but rather to one's policy attitudes towards electoral access. Importantly, for conservative and Black voters, the policy remedies that would lead to increased trust for one group would only further exacerbate the concerns of the other, suggesting that distrust towards American elections will be difficult to attenuate.

ObjectiveDo people set aside their partisan differences and rally around elected officials during a pandemic? President Trump's delegation of responsibility to the states during the COVID‐19 pandemic placed governors on the frontlines of the battle; some have shined and garnered positive national attention, others have wilted under the pressure of the national spotlight.MethodsWe use regression discontinuity design and exploit a discontinuity in the state's political events to assess the support of a governor's response to the pandemic.ResultsUsing survey data from Florida's registered voters, we find that Governor DeSantis's approval dropped by 7 percentage points following his "Safer at Home" order press conference on April 1.ConclusionOur results suggest that under certain circumstances partisanship can blunt a "rally around the flag" effect. This finding provides context to understanding when and under which circumstances elected officials can expect increases (or decreases) in public support.

Abstract
Declining response rates and increasing costs of collecting public opinion survey data have led to an increasing usage of dual-mode surveys. Revisiting foundational theories of political knowledge, issue constraint, and issue voting, we gauge the theoretical implications this methodological change has in our understanding of the public opinion and voter behavior. We see different patterns in the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies and observe clear mode effects in an original dual-mode survey experiment of Florida registered voters. Overall, we find that web respondents appear to be more politically knowledgeable, ideologically constrained, and have greater correspondence between issue and vote preferences compared to face-to-face or phone respondents. Survey mode matters, even with a common sampling frame.

AbstractMight elite cues affect how we vote? Extant literature focuses on effects of elite cues on candidate evaluation or policy preference, but we know little about how they might affect vote method preferences. Drawing on a large survey of validated Florida voters, including those who regularly vote by mail, we find that retrospective and prospective misreporting of vote method prior to the 2020 General Election was driven primarily by support for Trump. The president's supporters who were most politically aware were most likely to disavow their own voting by mail and misreport their anticipated vote method in the November election. Understanding the effects—and limits—of elite cues on the politicization of self-reported political behavior has important implications for pollsters and campaigns, election administrators, voters, and the broader democratic electoral process.

AbstractVoters use salient issues to inform their vote choice. Using 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES) data, we analyze how short-, medium-, and long-term issues informed the vote for president in the 2020 election, which witnessed record-setting participation. To explain the dynamics of presidential vote choice, we employ a voter typology advanced by Key (1966). Specifically, compared to standpatters, who in 2020 registered the same major party vote as in 2016, we find that new voters in 2020 and voters switching their preferences from 2016 cast their ballots in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. In the end, President Donald Trump was denied reelection by new voters and vote switchers principally because certain issues had a notable effect in moving their presidential preferences in the Democratic direction.

Abstract
With the increasing usage of dual-mode data collection, researchers of public opinion have shown considerable interest in understanding response differences across different interview modes. Are mode effects an outcome of representation or measurement differences across modes? We conducted a dual-mode survey (web and telephone) using Florida's voter file as the sampling frame, randomly assigning registered voters into one mode versus the other. Having a priori information about the respondents allows us to gauge whether and how sample composition differences may be driven by mode effects, and whether mode affects estimated models of political behavior. Survey mode effects are still significant for issue voting even when sampling design is similar for both modes.

Because of the COVID-19 threat to in-person voting in the November 2020 election, state and local election officials have pivoted to mail-in voting as a potential solution. This method of voting—while safe from a public health standpoint—comes with its own set of problems, as increased use of mail voting risks amplifying existing discrepancies in rejected mail ballots. While some mail ballot rejections are to be expected, a lack of uniformity in whose ballots get rejected among subgroups of voters—whether for mistakes on a ballot return envelope (BRE) or lateness—raise concerns about equal representation. We draw on official statewide voter file and mail-in ballot data from the 2018 midterm election in Georgia, a state that until the pandemic did not have widespread use of mail voting, to test whether some voters are more likely to cast a mail ballot that does not count. Most importantly, we distinguish between ballots rejected for lateness and those rejected for a mistake on the return envelope. We find that newly registered, young, and minority voters have higher rejection rates compared with their counterparts.

How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida's voter file, we argue that on-campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida's 2020 Presidential Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-campus young voters because they lost the opportunity to cast early in-person and Election Day ballots. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we find that on-campus students, in part because they had early and Election Day voting available to them on campus in the 2020 general election, were more likely than comparable off-campus student-aged registered voters to cast ballots in the November election. Our study has important implications for academic debates concerning the turnout effects of convenience voting reforms and the ability of voters to cast ballots prior to Election Day.

This study investigates the reliability of Florida's voter registration files through a phone survey, asking respondents to verify their records. We find 17.7% of registrants fail to verify at least one identifying piece of information. Applying the total survey error (TSE) framework, we classify these errors as due to coverage error, measurement error, or processing error. These inconsistencies create election administration and campaign inefficiencies, which lead to poorer voter experiences, and challenge the validity of some research based on these data. Furthermore, if registration records do not accurately capture the members of protected groups, the data are less helpful in both government monitoring and enforcement. We suggest voter registration forms should be treated like survey questionnaires so as to improve data quality with better form design, and that some vote overreport bias is attributable to limitations of voter file data, not to respondents' vote misreporting.