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How do voters make decisions in low-information elections? How distinctive are these voting decisions? Traditional approaches to the study of voting and elections often fail to address these questions by ignoring other elections taking place simultaneously. In this groundbreaking book, Stephen Nicholson shows how issue agendas shaped by state ballot propositions prime voting decisions for presidential, gubernatorial, Senate, House, and state legislative races. As a readily accessible source of information, the issues raised by ballot propositions may have a spillover effect on elections and ultimately define the meaning of myriad contests. Nicholson examines issues that appear on the ballot alongside candidates in the form of direct legislation. Found in all fifty states, but most abundant in those states that feature citizen-initiated ballot propositions, direct legislation represents a large and growing source of agenda issues. Looking at direct legislation issues such as abortion, taxes, environmental regulation, the nuclear freeze, illegal immigration, and affirmative action, Nicholson finds that these topics shaped voters' choices of candidates even if the issues were not featured in a particular contest or were not relevant to the job responsibilities of a particular office. He concludes that the agendas established by ballot propositions have a far greater effect in priming voters than is commonly recognized, and indeed, that the strategic use of initiatives and referenda by political elites potentially thwarts the will of the people

People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in- and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co-partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out-party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using survey experiments from the 2008 presidential election, I examine whether in- and out-party candidate cues-John McCain and Barack Obama-affected partisan opinion. The results indicate that in-party leader cues do not persuade but that out-party leader cues polarize. This finding holds in an experiment featuring President Bush in which his endorsement did not persuade Republicans but it polarized Democrats. Lastly, I compare the effect of party leader cues to party label cues. The results suggest that politicians, not parties, function as polarizing cues. Adapted from the source document.

On 24 May 2001, US Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont formally announced that he intended to leave the Republican party to become an Independent. Although congressional party switches in the United States are noteworthy because of their infrequency, the Jeffords switch was especially significant because he would caucus with the Democratic party, handing the Democratic party control of the Senate by a one-vote margin. When Jeffords formally left the Republican party on 5 June 2001, it was the first time that partisan control of the US Senate changed hands mid-session. Perhaps most importantly, with the House and presidency under Republican control, the Jeffords move ushered in the return of divided government – split party control of the executive and legislative branches. Indeed, Jeffords' switch received vast amounts of media attention precisely for this reason. The scant attention given to other recent party defectors in the US Senate such as Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado or Robert (Bob) Smith of New Hampshire suggests that the Jeffords switch was much larger than a senator simply changing his party affiliation.Over the last twenty years, split partisan control of the executive and legislative branches occurred in American government roughly two-thirds of the time. Given the frequency of divided government, especially in the post-war era, scholars have written much about its causes. The focus of much of this research concerns voting behaviour, especially ticket-splitting and voting against the president's party at the midterm (midterm voting). Some scholars advocate 'cognitive madisonianism' or 'policy-balancing' explanations, which posit that a subset of voters with moderate policy preferences intentionally, but not necessarily consciously, engage in ticket-splitting or midterm voting to bring about policy moderation or 'balance' among the parties. Others contend that ticket splitting and midterm voting is unintentional, a by-product of factors that shape voting behaviour such as candidates, partisanship and campaigns.

Studies that examine whether voters make informed decisions on direct legislation and whether direct legislation enhances civic engagement presume a basic awareness of ballot propositions, yet little is known about why some ballot propositions are more widely known than others. Despite the fact that research on awareness of ballot propositions and political awareness focus on individual factors, the political environment plays a vital role. This study seeks to advance our understanding of environmental factors in explaining awareness of ballot propositions. Using data on California ballot elections between the years 1956 and 2000, I find that the political environment has a substantial effect on voter awareness. Specifically, I find that the electoral cycle, media coverage, campaign spending, voter fatigue, the number of days before an election, and issues that concern morality, civil liberties, and civil rights contribute to ballot proposition awareness.

AbstractPublic policy is often about numbers that affect people's lives in fundamental ways. Given the central importance of numbers, we examine anchoring, a heuristic in which people are influenced by an initial number in expressing a preference. Across a series of experiments and three unique surveys, we find evidence of anchoring effects, but not uniformly so. In contrast to experiments in psychology and behavioral economics, we find no evidence that irrelevant or arbitrary anchors shape policy preferences. Yet, when provided politically relevant anchors that clearly correspond to the policy proposal, we find evidence of strong effects, even in the face of party cues or in the absence of a status quo policy point. Taken together, our results demonstrate that there is a psychological explanation for why the status quo occupies a powerful position in policy debates as well as why agenda setting is so influential.

We examined sensitive questions on political trust and regime support in China using indirect methods. We replicated previous list experiment results confirming that a majority trusts the central government despite overreports. We also conducted novel list experiments on trust in local government and support for removal of the presidential term limit and found evidence of overreporting for both. The point estimate for local government also suggests majority trust, but the central government is both more trusted and feared. However, we did not find evidence of majority support for removing the term limit at the time of the removal, indicating that the public may negatively evaluate government, albeit indirectly, in some circumstances. Last, examining self-monitoring, a personality trait for examining social desirability, we found that it only influenced overreporting trust in the central government. The results reveal meaningful variation in political trust and regime support in the world's largest authoritarian society.

Public understandings of race in the United States have evolved, at least among some, to acknowledge that whiteness confers privilege. In contrast to the negative racial stereotypes that animate racial resentment, white privilege inverts the lens by focusing on whites and the notion that whiteness confers unearned advantages. Given the centrality of race in American politics, we investigate white privilege denial and whether it matters politically. Our inquiry shows white privilege denial is a distinct racial construct and that nearly half of whites are at least somewhat in denial with nearly one-third rejecting all the white privilege items. We found that white privilege denial is politically consequential, helping explain white attitudes across a range of political attitudes including support for political leaders, parties, and public policy. To capture the range and complexity of racial attitudes among whites, we recommend that studies of racial attitudes in politics include white privilege denial.

AbstractIn the wake of the 2008 election, disgruntled conservatives organized opposition to President Obama's policies under a new movement dubbed the Tea Party. As an emerging force in American politics, we seek to understand who supports the Tea Party and the political attitudes these individuals hold. Using a nationally representative survey of respondents during the 2010 midterm elections, we examine whether the emerging narrative surrounding the Tea Party is accurate. The survey included a novel embedded experiment designed to investigate claims that animosity toward racial minorities drives Tea Party opposition to welfare. We find support for the contention that the Tea Party is predominately white, male, conservative, and strongly opposed to tax increases. Tea Party supporters, however, are not simply libertarians. In spite of appeals to freedom and liberty common in Tea Party rhetoric, a strong authoritarian pulse exists among its most ardent supporters. Furthermore, although we find evidence that racial resentment colors Tea Party members' judgments about government aid to the poor, racial animus does not appear to be the primary force behind their opposition to government aid. Lastly, we uncover some evidence of heterogeneity within the movement, with a small minority of Tea Party supporters voicing less-extreme political attitudes and evincing a rejection of negative racial stereotypes.