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How voters use political issues to elect political candidates is of central importance to our understanding of democratic representation. Research on voting behavior often assumes that American voters hold distinct economic and cultural issue preferences. In this research note, we point out that this does not necessarily imply that preferences for candidates' positions on the two issue dimensions are also additively separable in voters' decisions. Analyzing survey data on US presidential elections from 1996 to 2016, we estimate to what extent voters' economic and socio-cultural preferences are nonseparable and find that the two general dimensions act as substitutes in their decisions. Our finding implies that voting decisions are partially structured by an underlying single dimension, as liberal deviations from a voter's ideal point on social issues can be compensated by conservative deviations on economic issues.

In most multidimensional spatial models, the systematic component of agent utility functions is specified as additive separable. We argue that this assumption is too restrictive, at least in the context of spatial voting in mass elections. Here, assuming separability would stipulate that voters do not care about how policy platforms combine positions on multiple policy dimensions. We present a statistical implementation of Davis, Hinich, and Ordeshook's (1970) Weighted Euclidean Distance model that allows for the estimation of the direction and magnitude of non-separability from vote choice data. We demonstrate in a Monte-Carlo experiment that conventional separable model specifications yield biased and/or unreliable estimates of the effect of policy distances on vote choice probabilities in the presence of non-separable preferences. In three empirical applications, we find voter preferences on economic and socio-cultural issues to be non-separable. If non-separability is unaccounted for, researchers run the risk of missing crucial parts of the story. The implications of our findings carry over to other fields of research: checking for non-separability is an essential part of robustness testing in empirical applications of multidimensional spatial models.

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.

AbstractIndividual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators' responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally‐elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators' responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.