Suchergebnisse

Abstract
I apply a new theoretical framework to voting to more cohesively bridge the economic cost-benefit model of voting with the psychology-motivated voting-as-a-habit literature. This new theoretical frame gives greater clarity as to how a vote in one election might beget a vote in another election, while yielding testable predictions as to which circumstances are more favorable for developing turnout persistence. To test these predictions, I make use of a novel dataset consisting of nine large-N, door-to-door voter mobilization field experiments in various election contexts (with ∼1.8 million voters in total). Consistent with prior empirical research, my analysis finds that being nudged to vote in one election leads to increased turnout four years later. But the main contribution of this paper is that the theoretical framework's predictions and the corresponding empirical results make sense of turnout persistence heterogeneities that have been detected in certain prior empirical studies but not others.

Lucid, a popular source of online convenience survey samples, has seen a significant increase in inattentive respondents since 2020. Inattentive participants – respondents who incorrectly answer directed query attention check questions – may be introducing substantial measurement error and attenuation bias. Using data from 152,967 survey respondents across multiple studies conducted between January 2020 and June 2021, we find that inattentive respondents report less reliable demographic data, less stable responses, and are systematically different from attentive respondents. We find some evidence of attenuation bias and mixed evidence that data quality has decreased slightly since 2020 even after filtering for inattentive respondents. We conclude that researchers using Lucid should report if they screened on attentiveness and consider replicating any null results. Such an unexpected increase in inattentiveness in a widely-used platform suggests that future researchers relying on online convenience survey samples should continuously assess data quality.