research of seth j. hill
publications
- Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, and Seth J. Hill. 2013. "Identifying the Effects of All-Mail Elections on Turnout: Staggered Reform in the Evergreen State."
Political Science Research and Methods (forthcoming). [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: What effect does moving to all-mail elections have on participation? On one hand, all registered voters automatically receive a ballot to return by post at their convenience. On the other hand, the social aspect of the polling place, and the focal point of Election Day is lost. Current estimates of the effect of all-mail elections on turnout are ambiguous. In this article, we offer an improved design and new estimates of the effect of moving to all-mail elections. Exploiting cross-sectional and temporal variation in county-level implementation of all-mail elections in Washington State, we find that the reform increased aggregate participation by between two and four percentage points. Using individual observations from the state voter file, we also find that the reform increases turnout more for lower-participating registrants than frequent voters, suggesting that this reform reduces turnout disparities between these groups.
- Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Seth J. Hill. 2013. "Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment."
American Journal of Political Science (in press; formerly NBER Working Paper w17673). [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: 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.
- Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Seth J. Hill. 2013. "Who Wants to Discuss Vote Choices with Others? Polarization in Preferences for Deliberation."
Public Opinion Quarterly (in press). [ Link to paper. | Local link to paper. ]
Abstract: 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 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 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.
- Bafumi, Joseph, Michael C. Herron, Seth J. Hill, and Jeffrey B. Lewis. 2012. "Alvin Greene? Who? How did he win the United States Senate Nomination in South Carolina?"
Election Law Journal 11 (4): pp 358-379. [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: Alvin Greene surprised the political world when he handily defeated Vic Rawl for the United States Senate nomination in the 2010 Democratic Primary in South Carolina. Greene had not run a campaign during the primary and appears to have been almost completely unknown prior to his surprise victory. Greene's win over Rawl, who had served eight years in the South Carolina House, was previously a circuit judge, and had in fact run a legitimate primary campaign, raised a variety of questions about how Greene could have managed to generate so much voter support. In light of lingering concerns that Greene's victory was due to malfeasance of some sort, we analyze both ballot-level and precinct-level voting data with an eye toward determining whether the 2010 Democratic Senate Primary in South Carolina appears problematic. We find that voting patterns in Greene's victory over Rawl do not exhibit unusual peculiarities and in fact are consistent with the types of regularities observed in American elections. Rawl is white and Greene is black, and this difference played a major role in Greene's victory. While this victory may have been a surprise, voters in the Greene vs. Rawl primary appear in retrospect to have behaved similarly to voters in other elections in the United States, thus lending legitimacy to Greene's win.
- Huber, Gregory A., Seth J. Hill, and Gabriel S. Lenz. 2012. "Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters' Limitations in Controlling Incumbents."
American Political Science Review 106 (4): pp 720-741. [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: 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.
- Chang, Eric C. C., Miriam A. Golden, and Seth J. Hill. 2010. "Legislative Malfeasance and Political Accountability."
World Politics 62 (2): pp 177-220. [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: One compelling justification for democracy is that public officials can be held accountable. Elected representatives who betray the public trust by extracting excessive rents are vulnerable to electoral retribution with loss of office. Perhaps surprisingly, however, evidence from a variety of countries documents that elected officials who are charged with or convicted of criminal wrongdoing are typically reelected rather than repudiated by the electorate. This finding resonates with studies that suggest in various ways that political accountability may be realized only imperfectly even in well-established democracies, either because voters hold politicians responsible for things patently not under their control or because voters fail to take unresponsive or malfeasant representatives to task. In this article we argue that electoral retribution for allegations of criminal behavior by national legislators hinges on the dissemination of relevant information by the mass media. Without media reports that inform voters of judicial allegations that public officials have engaged in criminal activities, the electorate's response to charges of malfeasance is one of apparent indifference. We thus identify the informational environment as a critical factor that affects the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable.
- Hill, Seth J., Michael C. Herron, and Jeffrey B. Lewis. 2010. "Economic Crisis, Iraq, and Race: A Study of the 2008 Presidential Election."
Election Law Journal 9 (1): pp 41-62. [ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was the beneficiary of a nationwide swing in 2008: he outperformed the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry across nearly the entire country. Nonetheless, there was substantial local variation in the degree to which support for Obama exceeded the support given to Kerry four years earlier. With this in mind we show that county-level variation in (1) economic conditions, (2) the human cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and (3) the sizes of African-American and Latino populations account for a major share of the local variation in the 2008 pro-Obama swing. Our estimates suggest that the downturn in the housing and mortgage markets and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq greatly advantaged Obama, increasing his national vote share by at least 5.8 percentage points. We also find that, within Southern states but not elsewhere in the country, the degree to which Obama outperformed Kerry across individual counties was strongly increasing in the size of African-American population.
- Atkinson, Matthew D., Ryan D. Enos, and Seth J. Hill. 2009. "Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes: Is the Face--Vote Correlation Caused by Candidate Selection?"
Quarterly Journal of Political Science 4 (3): pp 229-249. [ Link to paper. | Local link to paper. ]
Abstract: We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces.We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. Combining survey data with our facial quality scores and a measure of contest competitiveness, we find a face quality effect for Senate challengers of about 4 points for independent voters and 1-3 points for partisans. While we estimate face effects that could potentially matter in close elections, we find that the challenging candidate's face is never the difference between a challenger and incumbent victory in all 99 Senate elections in our study.
working
- Bullock, John G., Alan S. Gerber, Seth J. Hill, and Gregory A. Huber. "Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs About Politics."
[ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: Partisanship seems to affect factual beliefs about politics. For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Reagan. What remains unclear is whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize another. To shed light on this question, we develop a model of partisan survey response and report two experiments that are based on the model. The experiments show that small payments for correct and ``don't know'' responses sharply diminish the gap between Democrats and Republicans in responses to ``partisan'' factual questions. Our conclusion is that the apparent gulf in factual beliefs between members of different parties may be more illusory than real.
- Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Seth J. Hill. "The Voting Experience and Beliefs about Ballot Secrecy."
[ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: The legitimacy of democratic election results rests on the perceived fairness of the rules and procedures for voting. New democracies, for example, go to great length to install democratic institutions, while one of the hallmarks of long-standing democracies is strong institutions protecting the electoral process. In this paper, we argue that beliefs about these democratic institutions, and not just their existence, are of central importance to legitimate elections. We show that even in the United States doubts about democratic institutions are surprisingly prevalent: We find that 36 percent of respondents to a nationally representative survey hold doubts that the choices they make on their ballots remain anonymous. We also present evidence that polling place voters experience a variety of situations that might violate the privacy of their voting process. Concerns about the anonymity of the ballot are greater among those who have not previously voted and for those voting with electronic machines and by mail. These findings suggest an important divergence between public perceptions about the secret ballot and the institutional status of the secret ballot in the United States, a divergence that may have important consequences. More broadly, this evidence suggests that individual beliefs should not be ignored when considering the effects and operation of political institutions.
- Hill, Seth J. "The Persuasion Region: A Theory of Electoral Change."
[ Local link to paper. ]
Abstract: Do candidates win elections by mobilizing new voters or by persuading existing voters? Despite its simplicity, this question is not straightforward to answer. I begin with a simple theory of electoral change, derived from the spatial model of voting, from which I introduce the \emph{persuasion region}, a segment of the electorate ``up for grabs'' by both parties between one election and the next. To illustrate the theory's explanatory power, I use a new Bayesian model to leverage the information contained in precinct-level election returns by merging these data with 36.6 million individual-level voter registration and turnout records across four years, three elections, and two states. I show that in election pairs with large persuasion regions, both-election voters who switch between the parties are a larger influence on election outcomes. In elections with smaller persuasion regions, new voters are a greater influence on the outcome. I then demonstrate the power of the persuasion region, and the mechanism at work, using individual-level panel data from the American National Election Studies. Fundamental characteristics of competing candidates structure the relative contribution of persuasion and mobilization to election outcomes.
- Hill, Seth J., James Lo, Lynn Vavreck, and John Zaller. "How Quickly We Forget: Late Campaign Advertising and Electoral Advantage."
Winner of the Lazarsfeld Award for best paper, Political Communication Section, APSA 2007.
Abstract: American political campaigns routinely spend tens of millions of dollars on television advertising over a period of weeks or even months before Election Day. However, our examination of the effects of advertising in a set of presidential, gubernatorial, Senate, and House elections, using both survey data and county-level returns, show that the effects of most advertising decay rapidly. Decay is so rapid that advertising in the last week or even on the day before the election can drown out the effects of most previous advertising. These findings suggest that candidates are surprisingly inefficient in deploying campaign resources. They also show that short-term and arguably superficial political opinions can determine election outcomes.
- Hill, Seth J., James Lo, Lynn Vavreck, and John Zaller. "The Opt-in Internet Panel: Survey Mode, Sampling Methodology and the Implications for Political Research."
[ Link to paper. ]
Abstract: All survey methodologies have weaknesses, some known and others unknown. Given that there are no "true" targets against which to assess the political marginal distributions about which we care, the decision to use any survey methodology must be met with caution and full disclosure about the strengths and weaknesses of the method, and how it might affect the results. In this paper, we assess the differences among several national surveys in terms of demographics, marginals on political variables, and ideological constraint among respondents at varying levels of political awareness. Our results suggest that Polimetrix's sample matching technique, used in the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, seems to produce Internet samples that look more similar to existing RDD phone surveys than to multi-stage probability face-to-face surveys, but surprisingly, many of the discernible differences are not large in size. We conclude that a mildly biased but large Internet survey can produce more reliable estimates than an unbiased but small survey (because of the random error due to the small samples). When matters of cost are factored in, the large, biased sample becomes even more appealing to researchers with limited budgets. The question about Internet samples (even matched samples such as those generated by Polimetrix) remains, however, whether the ignorability assumption holds such that the people who take surveys online behave the same way as those who do not, or more precisely, as those who take phone or in-person surveys.