Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe arrival of Hurricane Sandy within a week of the 2012 presidential election caused unprecedented disruption to the final days of the campaign and Election Day in areas that were affected. The precise impact of the storm on those areas hit hardest was not necessarily clear. Contrary to prior research on the effect of disasters on electoral outcomes, we find that the president's vote share was ultimately increased in storm-affected areas by about four percentage points, plus or minus two points. While those states most heavily affected were unlikely to give their electoral vote to Romney because of other factors, we present counterfactual analyses that show that such a storm could have had a significant impact on swing states: although the storm only affected some areas, we show that Virginia would likely have been won by Romney were it not hit at all, whereas North Carolina would likely have gone for Obama had it been directly in the storm's path.

AbstractAlthough placebo conditions are ubiquitous in survey experiments, little evidence guides common practices for their use and selection. How should scholars choose and construct placebos? First, we review the role of placebos in published survey experiments, finding that placebos are used inconsistently. Then, drawing on the medical literature, we clarify the role that placebos play in accounting for nonspecific effects (NSEs), or the effects of ancillary features of experiments. We argue that, in the absence of precise knowledge of NSEs that placebos are adjusting for, researchers should average over a corpus of many placebos. We demonstrate this agnostic approach to placebo construction through the use of GPT-2, a generative language model trained on a database of over 1 million internet news pages. Using GPT-2, we devise 5,000 distinct placebos and administer two experiments (N = 2,975). Our results illustrate how researchers can minimize their role in placebo selection through automated processes. We conclude by offering tools for incorporating computer-generated placebo text vignettes into survey experiments and developing recommendations for best practice.

Leading opinion research on immigration has begun to move from size-based to change-based measures of citizens' ethnic context. This shift is based on the theoretical assumption that over-time growth in immigrant populations is more likely to capture citizens' attention than their current size. At present, there is no empirical evidence supporting this assumption. This article demonstrates that while the size of local immigrant populations exerts virtually no effect on perceived immigration, over-time growth strongly influences citizens' perceptions of immigration into their community. In addition, our analyses illuminate the differential contribution of growth in local Hispanic and Asian populations to perceived immigration.

Transformative changes in urban economies are raising vital questions about minority representation. Given that cities are sites of political power for communities of color, gentrification and the housing affordability crisis threaten to deteriorate decades of progress. This article considers the impact of these economic and demographic shifts on minority candidate supply and success. Collecting data on 166 city councils across several decades, we find that White population growth is associated with reductions in local political power for Black and Latino councilors. We also observe modest evidence that local economic improvements may not have deleterious effects on the diversity of city councils. We probe these findings using data on local elections, as well as over 380,000 tweets from city councilors, and uncover evidence of a candidate supply mechanism in the case of "racial gentrification" and a credit-claiming mechanism in the case of "economic gentrification." We conclude by discussing the political implications of the cross-cutting effects we observe.

AbstractDespite the importance of ethnic television within immigrant communities, its effects on political participation are unclear. On the one hand, ethnic media can mobilize and inform voters. On the other hand, it can serve as a source of diversion and reduce the desire to participate. To evaluate these competing possibilities, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity (GRD) approach involving Federal Communication Commission reception boundaries for Spanish‐language television stations in two states. Additionally, we replicate and unpack our GRD analyses using three nationally representative samples of Latinos. Across multiple studies, we find that access to Spanish‐language television is associated with decreases in turnout, ethnic civic participation, and political knowledge. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings on the ethnic politics, political communication, and social capital literatures.

The spread of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines threatens to prolong the pandemic, with prior evidence indicating that exposure to misinformation has negative effects on intent to be vaccinated. We describe results from randomized experiments in the United States (n = 5,075) that allow us to measure the effects of factual corrections on false beliefs about the vaccine and vaccination intent. Our evidence makes clear that corrections eliminate the effects of misinformation on beliefs about the vaccine, but that neither misinformation nor corrections affect vaccination intention. These effects are robust to formatting changes in the presentation of the corrections. Indeed, corrections without any formatting modifications whatsoever prove effective at reducing false beliefs, with formatting variations playing a very minor role. Despite the politicization of the pandemic, misperceptions about COVID-19 vaccines can be consistently rebutted across party lines.