In trying to understand why Americans display relatively high levels of opposition to welfare, scholars have frequently turned to the analysis of a canonical experiment reported in this journal (Smith 1987; Rasinski 1989) in which subjects were asked about their support for either “welfare” or “assistance to the poor.” This experiment consistently shows that Americans are substantially less supportive of welfare than of assistance to the poor. This difference has been interpreted as evidence that simply describing the same core programs as welfare rather than assistance to the poor depresses support. The key assumption in these analyses is one of programmatic equivalence: relative to the words “assistance to the poor,” the word “welfare” describes the same programs, but differs in which considerations it brings to mind. This research note examines the validity of this key assumption. Analyses of novel experimental data show that there appear to be basic differences in which programs Americans consider to be welfare and which they consider to be assistance to the poor. We discuss the implications of our research for interpreting prior studies that rely upon this experiment to test theories of framing, and we suggest broader implications for survey experimental designs.

Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to these questions help us grapple with the evolving relationship between voters and candidates in a rapidly changing information environment. Our results suggest that voters rarely prefer targeted pandering to general messages and that “mistargeted” voters penalize candidates enough to erase the positive returns to targeting. Theoretically, targeting may allow candidates to quietly promise particularistic benefits to narrow audiences, thereby altering the nature of political representation, but voters seem to prefer being solicited based on broad principles and collective benefits.

Why are politicians more likely to advance the interests of those of their race? I present a field experiment demonstrating that black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks' interests than are their counterparts. Guided by elite interviews, I emailed 6,928 U.S. state legislators from a putatively black alias asking for help signing up for state unemployment benefits. Crucially, I varied the legislators’ political incentive to respond by randomizing whether the sender purported to live within or far from each legislator's district. While nonblack legislators were markedly less likely to respond when their political incentives to do so were diminished, black legislators typically continued to respond even when doing so promised little political reward. Black legislators thus appear substantially more intrinsically motivated to advance blacks’ interests. As political decision making is often difficult for voters to observe, intrinsically motivated descriptive representatives play a crucial role in advancing minorities’ political interests.

Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation of policy attitudes that we validate using a distinctive opinion survey of our own design, fielded not long after the onset of the Great Recession. The survey tracks citizens' economic experiences, expectations, and policy attitudes within multiple domains of risk (employment, medical care, family, and wealth arrangements). These investigations show that economic insecurity systematically and substantially affects citizens' attitudes toward government's role. Citizens' economic worries largely track exposure to substantial economic shocks. Citizens' policy attitudes in turn appear highly responsive to economic worries, as well as to the experience of economic shocks—with worries and shocks creating greater support for government policies that buffer the relevant economic risk. Attitudes seem most affected by temporally proximate shocks, shocks befalling households that have weak private safety nets, and shocks occurring within the domain most relevant to the policy in question, though attitudes are also (more weakly) correlated with shocks in other domains. The magnitude of these associations rivals partisanship and ideology and almost always exceeds that for conventional measures of socio-economic status. Given the long-term increase in economic insecurity and current sluggish recovery, understanding how insecurity shapes citizens' policy attitudes and political behavior should be a major concern of political science.

A key test of a political system is its capacity to solve important societal problems. Few policy areas in the U.S. are more problem-ridden than health care. Medical care is expensive and wasteful, and the quality often falls short of best practice. One idea to improve health care is to eliminate gaps in the medical evidence base through “comparative effectiveness research” (CER). By identifying what treatments, tests, and technologies work best, CER could help doctors, patients, and payers make better decisions and help reduce wasteful spending. CER was a technocratic, third-tier issue familiar mainly to policy experts based in universities, foundations, and think tanks, but hardly anyone else. This paper traces how this obscure policy initiative got caught up in the wider ideological struggle over national health reform.

We conducted two national surveys of public opinion about comparative effectiveness research and the integration of findings from the research into clinical practice. The first survey found broad support for using research results to provide information, but less support for using them to allocate government resources or mandate treatment decisions. In addition, the public is willing to consider the use of financial incentives to encourage patients to choose cheaper treatments, if research demonstrates that they work as well as more expensive ones. The second survey found that support for comparative effectiveness research dropped in response to general debates about its consequences but that arguments against the research could be effectively countered by specific, targeted rebuttals.

Using research to develop treatment guidelines is one way to lower medical costs and improve care. However, findings from a national survey show that the public is skeptical about this approach. Specifically, the public finds arguments against establishing research-based treatment guidelines more convincing than arguments in favor of it. Our findings suggest that for evidence-based treatment guidelines to win public acceptance, the public needs to be reassured that guidelines would not lead to the limiting of access to beneficial care.

This essay uses the case of the "medical evidence gap" to illustrate how polarization and party competition can undermine efforts to solve a societal problem. Policy experts associated with both parties agree that the lack of hard evidence about what treatments work best for patients with different conditions is a significant health care problem, and that greater investments in "comparative effectiveness research" (CER) would enable patients, providers, and payers to make more informed decisions. Until recently, CER was a technocratic, third-tier issue. Over the past year, however, CER became highly politicized because it got caught up in the partisan struggle over universal health care reform. The story of how CER morphed into a symbol of crude rationing schemes and government interference with the doctor-patient relationship offers a cautionary lesson about the limits of pragmatic governance in an era of polarization.

Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one’s choices with others or to treat them as personal matters. We find that the American public is evenly divided on this issue. We also find that those who are least confident in their political capabilities—those who arguably could benefit most from deliberating about their vote choices—are most likely to say that choices should be treated as personal matters. Our findings have implications for understanding the role of political deliberation in the United States.

A perfect storm of incumbency advantage--that was the essence of the 2012 election for governors, senators, and House members running again, not to mention a president and a vice president. About the book: Bringing together top-flight scholars to reflect on and analyze all aspects of the 2012 elections, editor Michael Nelson’s The Elections of 2012 can be counted on to deliver a nuanced breakdown of the outcomes, implications, and consequences of yet another momentous political contest. Whether discussing particular races or taking a broader look at national trends, contributors captivate students with stories and political drama, yet weave in important scholarship and expert analysis. Each chapter, written specifically for this volume, offers readers historical perspective, as well as a forward look to implications for the political system. Edited by Michael Nelson, Rhodes College.

Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protections of ballot secrecy to registered voters prior to the 2010 general election. Consistent with our survey data, we find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. The increase in turnout of more than three percentage points for those without previous records of voting is notably larger than the effect of a standard get-out-the-vote mailing for this group. Overall, these results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long-standing institution in the United States, beliefs about this institution may not match the legal reality and that providing basic information about ballot secrecy can affect the decision to participate to an important degree.

The 2008-2010 campaign to pass climate legislation was one of the largest efforts in the history of energy and environmental politics. Yet despite initial legislative success in the House of Representatives in early 2009 and the strong forces arrayed in support of a climate bill, the Senate dropped the issue from consideration in the summer of 2010. Such a high profile defeat might be expected to attract substantial academic attention. However, nearly three years out little analysis has been forthcoming. This paper addresses that gap in current scholarship, seeking to both inform academic understanding of climate politics and provide insights to practitioners and policymakers. The analysis is structured into two main sections. The first section examines four key barriers that protected the policy status quo: partisan polarization, political geography, energy interests and the recession. Through comparison with the Affordable Care Act and the history of U.S. environmental policymaking, the second section suggests three political forces that might have helped strength the climate campaign: public opinion, grassroots mobilization and presidential leadership. It further suggests that the failures of the climate campaign to pay sufficient attention to opinion and mobilization are symptomatic of broader challenges facing an increasingly professionalized and Washington-based environmental movement.

The effectiveness of prerecorded phone calls was assessed in the context of a Texas Republican primary election that featured a contest for state Supreme Court. Automated calls endorsing one of the judicial candidates were recorded by the sitting Republican governor and directed at more than a quarter million people identified as likely voters and probable supporters of the governor. Two experimental designs were used to evaluate the calls’ effectiveness. The first design randomly assigned households to treatment and control conditions in order to gauge the calls’ effects on individuals’ voter turnout, as measured by public records. The second design randomly assigned precincts to treatment and control conditions in order to assess whether the calls increased the precinct level vote margin of the endorsed candidate. Results suggest that the automated calls had weak and statistically insignificant effects on turnout and vote margins.

We examine whether Big Five personality traits are associated with heterogeneous responses to commonly used Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) appeals in both a survey and a field experiment. The results suggest that Big Five personality traits affect how people respond to the costs and benefits of voting highlighted in GOTV appeals. Our evidence also suggests that one trait—Openness—is associated with broad persuasibility, while others shape responses to particular types of messages. In some cases the conditioning effects of Big Five traits are substantial. For example, in the one-voter households (HHs) included in our field experiment, we find that a mailer that raised the specter of social sanctions increased the likelihood of voting by a statistically greater amount among those scoring high on Openness. The findings constitute an important step forward in understanding how core personality traits shape responses to various aspects of the act of voting.

Depending on their state of residence, Americans can participate in Presidential nomination contests either by voting in a primary or by attending a caucus. Since caucus participation requires more time and effort than primary voting, it has long been thought that caucuses must attract a more partisan, activist, and politically extreme cohort of citizens than primaries. This paper challenges the view that more burdensome electoral institutions necessarily ought to attract more politically engaged citizens. I propose a theory of peripheral motivations that predicts caucus goers and primary voters will not differ in terms of their political attitudes or interest, but they will differ in their levels of community engagement. The key insight is that many of the reasons why citizens choose to participate or abstain from politics actually have little to do with politics. Analysis of two surveys from the 2008 Presidential election substantiates the theoretical expectations.

We examine the associations between personality traits and the strength and direction of partisan identification using a large national sample. We theorize that the relationships between Big Five personality traits and which party a person affiliates with should mirror those between the Big Five and ideology, which we find to be the case. This suggests that the associations between the Big Five and the direction of partisan identification are largely mediated by ideology. Our more novel finding is that personality traits substantially affect whether individuals affiliate with any party as well as the strength of those affiliations, effects that we theorize stem from affective and cognitive benefits of affiliation. In particular, we find that three personality traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Openness) predict strength of partisan identification (p < 0.05). This result holds even after controlling for ideology and a variety of issue positions. These findings contribute to our understanding of the psychological antecedents of partisan identification.

Are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In three experiments, our participants (1) overweighted recent relative to overall incumbent performance when made aware of an election closer rather than more distant from that event, (2) allowed an unrelated lottery that affected their welfare to influence their choices, and (3) were influenced by rhetoric to give more weight to recent rather than overall incumbent performance. These biases were apparent even though we informed and incentivized respondents to weight all performance equally. Our findings point to key limitations in voters’ ability to use a retrospective decision rule.

Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of registering to vote at any given time and a constant probability of moving. A strong relationship between age and participation arises simply as a byproduct of the rules of the registration system, namely that participation is voluntary and that it is residentially based. Specifically, the probability that someone is registered increases over time (and thus with age) even when the probability of becoming registered is constant. A new, national random sample of 1.8 million voter registration records is employed to test the model. The model provides a theoretical foundation for the relationship between age and participation, identifies the functional form of that relationship, and solves a puzzle about the nature of participatory bias.