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Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. Sources of influence can be divided as external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An important question is how to disentangle the social contagion by peers from external influences. While a variety of experimental and observational studies provided insight into this problem, identifying the extent of contagion based on large-scale observational data with an unknown network structure remains largely unexplored. By bridging the gap between the large-scale complex systems perspective of collective human dynamics and the detailed approach of social sciences, we present a parsimonious model of social influence, and apply it to a central topic in political science--elections and voting behavior. We provide an analytical expression of the county vote-share distribution, which is in excellent agreement with almost a century of observed U.S. presidential election data. Analyzing the social influence topography over this period reveals an abrupt phase transition from low to high levels of social contagion, and robust differences among regions. These results suggest that social contagion effects are becoming more instrumental in shaping large-scale collective political behavior, with implications on democratic electoral processes and policies.
Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.
The global spread of COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus disease) has profoundly impacted on the delivery of public services and routine events that are integral to inclusive societies. Electoral processes are one such event. The opportunity for a society to confirm officials in elected office or remove them, within a constitutionally defined timeframe, is a pillar of democratic values and standards. The process of doing this is a communal one, and communal events intrinsically bring people together—a process that is contrary to the informed advice for limiting the transmission of a virus, such as the one that causes COVID-19. Decisions must be made to ensure democratic institutions function as they ordinarily would do, during extraordinary times, such as the outbreak of a global health pandemic. This Technical Paper offers an initial overview of key points for electoral administrators, governments and civil society organizations on administering elections amid the continued spread of COVID-19.
How do presidential candidates in new democracies choose their campaign strategies, and what strategies do they adopt? In contrast to the claim that campaigns around the world are becoming more similar to one another, Taylor Boas argues that new democracies are likely to develop nationally specific approaches to electioneering through a process called success contagion. The theory of success contagion holds that the first elected president to complete a successful term in office establishes a national model of campaign strategy that other candidates will adopt in the future. He develops this argument for the cases of Chile, Brazil, and Peru, drawing on interviews with campaign strategists and content analysis of candidates' television advertising from the 1980s through 2011. The author concludes by testing the argument in ten other new democracies around the world, demonstrating substantial support for the theory.
In the midst of the extraordinary challenges and uncertainty stemming from COVID-19, decision-makers are under increasing pressure to determine how to manage the pandemic’s immediate impact on, and consequences for, the timing and sequencing of elections. These decisions cannot be taken lightly, as they could jeopardize public health and shape the state of democracy in their countries, states or territories for years to come. The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly challenged elections, making new and pressing demands on how they are managed. The main public health threat associated with elections arises from the requirement for voters to cast their ballots in person at a polling station, most often on a single day. Having to converge to polling stations and handle voting materials that have been touched by many others, while being confined in crowded spaces where maintaining a safe distance from others may be difficult has suddenly become a new challenge. By devising timely, appropriate and sustainable solutions, drawn from own or others’ experience, electoral democracy frameworks can be gradually strengthened to withstand undue pressure.
We exploit a quasi-experimental setting provided by an election day with multiple polls to estimate the effect of voters' turnout on the spread of new COVID-19 infections and to quantify the policy trade-off implied by postponing elections during high infection periods. We show that post-poll new COVID cases increased by 1.1% for each additional percentage point of turnout. The cost-benefits analysis based on our estimates and real political events shows that averting an early general election has saved Italy up to about e362 million in additional hospital care costs and e7.5 billion in values of life saved from COVID.
The first edition of Get Out the Vote! broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly influenced how campaigns operate. In this expanded and updated edition, the authors incorporate data from more than one hundred new studies, which shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. Two new chapters focus on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events such as candidate forums and Election Day festivals. Available in time for the core of the 2008 presidential campaign, this practical guide on voter mobilization is sure to be an important resource for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations. Praise for the first edition: "Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in a slim and readable new book called Get Out the Vote!, which is bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes." —Alan B. Kreuger, in the New York Times "Get Out the Vote! shatters conventional wisdom about GOTV." —Hal Malchow in Campaigns & Elections "Green and Gerber's recent book represents important innovations in the study of turnout."—Political Science Review "Green and Gerber have provided a valuable resource for grassroots campaigns across the spectrum."—National Journal
Democratic politics is a collective enterprise, not simply because individual votes are counted to determine winners, but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens argue with one another and they generally arrive at political decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation. This book is dedicated to investigating the political implications of interdependent citizens within the context of the 1984 presidential campaign as it was experienced in the metropolitan area of South Bend, Indiana. Hence this is a community study in the fullest sense of the term. National politics is experienced locally through a series of filters unique to a particular setting and its consequences for the exercise of democratic citizenship.
"Butterfly ballots, balky machines, absentee ballot scandals, felons voting, Supreme Court intervention - all these made headlines during the infamous 2000 Florida recount. Could it happen again in this year's presidential election? The answer is yes, because not much has changed to improve our election systems, while both major parties are poised on a hair trigger to file lawsuits and challenge any close statewide vote. The issues may boil down to whether the margin of victory in any state exceeds the "margin of litigation."" "John Fund offers a guided tour of our error-prone election systems, which nearly half of Americans say they don't trust. When some states have systems so flawed that you can't tell where incompetence ends and possible fraud begins, it isn't surprising that scandals have ranged from rural Texas to big cities such as Milwaukee and St. Louis. Fund dissects some anomalies of Florida 2000 and analyzes the bitterly protracted election for governor of Washington State in 2004. He spotlights the perils of "provisional ballots," the flaws of the "Motor Voter" law that has allowed people to get absentee ballots for phantom voters, and the shady registration drives of the radical group ACORN. Meanwhile, the simple safeguard of a photo ID requirement meets vigorous opposition on the specious claim that it would disenfranchise poor and minority voters." "Stealing Elections presents a chilling portrait of electoral vulnerability, as a combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging put our democracy at risk."--BOOK JACKET.
As the confusion over the ballots in Florida in 2000 demonstrated, American elections are complex and anything but user-friendly. This phenomenon is by no means new, but with the weakening of political parties in recent decades and the rise of candidate-centered politics, the high level of complexity has become ever more difficult for many citizens to navigate. Thus the combination of complex elections and the steady decline of the party system has led to a decline in voter turnout. In this timely book, Martin Wattenberg confronts the question of what low participation rates mean for democracy. At the individual level, turnout decline has been highest among the types of people who most need to have electoral decisions simplified for them through a strong party system--those with the least education, political knowledge, and life experience. As Wattenberg shows, rather than lamenting how many Americans fail to exercise their democratic rights, we should be impressed with how many arrive at the polls in spite of a political system that asks more of a typical person than is reasonable. Meanwhile, we must find ways to make the American electoral process more user-friendly.