Inés Levin

Abstract: This thesis develops and applies a new theoretical and empirical approach to the study of political participation. It starts with a thorough review of existing theories and evidence of the determinants of political participation. The theories discussed in the literature review are subsequently synthesized using a dual-process account of participation decisions. The central premise of the account is that individuals engage in reasonable deliberation regarding the benefits and costs of participating in political activities, but this reasoning is limited by automatic responses to values, social identifications, and habits that predispose the individual toward participation or abstention. The next chapter develops a new statistical procedure for the study of political participation, based on mixture modeling and simultaneous consideration of involvement in multiple political activities that is consistent with the dual-process account of political participation discussed in the previous chapter. In this model the relationship between underlying utilities and participation probabilities is regulated by a parameter that captures individual propensities toward political participation. After that, the statistical method is applied to survey data from the 1990 American Citizen Participation Study (Verba et al., 1995), where it is used to test a series of hypotheses regarding the impact of resources and civic skills on political participation. Finally, the mixture modeling approach is applied to survey data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Elections Study (Ansolabehere, 2008), where it is used to measure the impact of perceptions of economic adversity and support for emergency economic policies on political participation.

Abstract: During each electoral period, the strategic interaction between voters and political elites determines the number of viable candidates in a district. In this paper, we implement a hierarchical seemingly unrelated regression model to explain electoral coordination at the district level in Uruguay as a function of district magnitude, previous electoral outcomes and electoral regime. Elections in this country are particularly useful to test for institutional effects on the coordination process due to the large variations in district magnitude, to the simultaneity of presidential and legislative races held under different rules, and to the reforms implemented during the period under consideration. We find that district magnitude and electoral history heuristics have substantial effects on the number of competing and voted-for parties and lists. Our modeling approach uncovers important interaction-effects between the demand and supply side of the political market that were often overlooked in previous research. [full version]

Abstract: We study public opinions about convenience voting reforms, using a unique state-by-state survey conducted in the 2008 presidential election. Our analysis of the American voting public’s support for potential convenience voting reforms provides a variety of important insights into the potential direction of innovations in the electoral process in the near future. First, we find that the most prominent convenience voting reforms have mixed support. These include attitudes toward automatic voter registration, Election Day voter registration, and moving Election Day to a weekend. These reforms do not have majority support among all voters in the United States but there are some states where these reforms do have majority support and could be implemented. Second, we find that Internet voting and voting-by-mail do not receive a great deal of support from American voters. There was no state where Internet voting was supported by a majority of voters and there were no states that do not already have expanded vote by mail (Washington and Oregon) where expanded vote by mail had majority support. Finally, we find that a majority of Americans support requiring showing photo identification (overwhelming support) and making Election Day a holiday (bare majority support). [full version]

Abstract: In this study we analyze the choice of voting mode in the 2008 presidential election. We use a large-sample survey with national coverage that allows us to overcome limitations of previous studies. Our analysis provides a number of insights into some of the important debates about convenience voting. Among other things, we find little support for the hypothesis that convenience voting methods have partisan implications; although we do find voter attributes that lead to the choice of some particular convenience voting mode. Results like these have important implications for future moves towards convenience voting and the design of new outreach campaigns. [full version]

Abstract: Between December 2007 and February 2009, Venezuelans participated twice in constitutional referenda where the elimination of presidential term limits was one of the most salient proposals. Assuming voter preferences did not change significantly during that period, the "repeated" character of these elections provide us with an excellent opportunity to apply forensic tools designed to detect anomalies and outliers in election returns in elections where electronic voting technologies were used. Similar tools were first applied by Myagkov et al. (2009) to the study of electoral fraud in Russia and Ukraine, and were effective in the isolation of potential cases of manipulation of electoral returns. The case of Venezuela is different because there exists no widespread agreement about the integrity or otherwise fraudulent nature of national elections, and because it is a nation where electronic voting technologies are used. Unless electoral fraud takes place in exactly the same manner in each election, an analysis of the "flow of votes" between elections can be used to detect suspicious patterns in electoral returns. Although we do not find evidence of pervasive electoral fraud compared, for instance, to the Russian case, our analysis is useful to detect polling places or regions deviating considerably from the more general pattern. [full version]

Abstract: Post-election audits are an integral part of the broader election audit process. Depending on the auditing method, they may detect miscounts in the official tabulation of votes, or limit the risk of certifying an incorrect outcome. In this chapter, we review the statistical methods for post-election auditing. We start by illustrating the limitations of fixed percentage statistical audits, which currently constitute the most common type of auditing method among states that require or allow post-election audits. Then, we described the statistics of more sophisticated auditing methods where the probability of drawing an auditing unit increases with the chance of error associated with that unit. After that, we discuss a new type of post-election auditing method that has received broad support from the scholarly community: risk-limiting audits, that have a minimum pre-specified chance of leading to a full recount when the outcome is incorrect. We also discuss additional statistical issues in post-election auditing, including the relevance of the auditing unit and alternative approaches to random sample generation. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations of statistical approaches to post-election auditing described earlier in the chapter, and difficulties that might be encountered while trying to apply them in real world elections.

Abstract: Rational choice theory serves as the basis for many important formal and empirical models of political behavior, and scholars often question whether rationality axioms are applicable to the mass electorate. To date, there have been few attempts to operationalize rigorous statistical tests of basic core assumptions of rational choice theory. In this paper we test basic assumptions of rational choice theory with a novel methodological approach, using actual electoral choices made by voters in real low-information elections. We find that a majority of voters behave consistently with an underlying structure of pairwise preferences that satisfies rationality axioms. Moreover, we find that preferences are meaningful and that voters who behave consistently with rationality in one contest repeat this behavior across races.

Abstract: This paper studies whether becoming an American citizen represents a major step toward the inclusion of Latino immigrants in the American polity. It compares the behavior of immigrants who have acquired citizenship with that of immigrants who are not willing or not eligible to become citizens, focusing on non-electoral political activities like contacting government officials and working to solve problems with others informally or through existing groups and organizations. The data analysis is based on recent survey data from the 2006 Latino National Survey (Fraga et al. 2006), and uses matching methods to control for the nonrandom selection of respondents into citizenship status. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the robustness of findings to hidden bias. Results suggest that acquiring citizenship is only a small step toward the full inclusion of Latino immigrants in the democratic process.

Abstract: In this paper I study patterns of behavior across a variety of political activities, and develop a new statistical method that allows learning about heterogeneities in participation that cannot be explained by standard measures of socio-economic status and access to resources. Also, the method allows classifying survey respondents into latent classes of citizens, depending on whether they participate more or less than expected across political activities. I apply this method to survey data from the 1990 American Citizen Participation Study. I find that there are activist and apathetic classes of citizens that vary considerably in terms of baseline participation propensities and sensitivity to political stimuli. Further, I find that activists are more politically engaged, are asked to participate more often, exhibit higher incidence of personal concerns, and differ slightly in terms of intensity of issue positions. The results I obtain are relevant not only for their implications for political representation, but also for the design of mobilization campaigns.

Abstract: During 2008, the U.S. government responded to the financial and economic crisis by enacting a series of emergency economic acts, including a financial system bailout, a fiscal stimulus package and a housing relief bill. In this paper, I study to what extent support or opposition to these policies had an impact on political participation using data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (Ansolabehere 2008). Instead of modeling overall political participation using an additive index, as is often done in the civic engagement literature, I model latent propensities toward participation using a Bayesian item-response model. After that, I conduct a multivariate analysis to study the impact of individual attributes on the latent trait. Among other things, I find that individuals opposing the fiscal stimulus package and the financial system bailout exhibited considerably larger propensities to participate in politics after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and political attitudes. This result provides further evidence that views expressed by activists are not representative of the preferences and opinions of the more general population.

Abstract: Until recently, a popular explanation of voter choice in Mexico was that voter decisions were driven by attitudes toward the hegemonic PRI regime. However, political conditions changed in Mexico after the victory of PAN’s candidate Vicente Fox in 2000. In this article, we use survey data from the 2006 Mexico Panel Study to analyze voter choice in Mexico’s new democracy, using statistical methodologies appropriate for modeling voter choice in multiparty elections. We find that contrary to what is often found in more stable democracies, region and party identification are the most important factors for explaining voter choice, although demographic factors, retrospective evaluations of the economy and assessments of candidate-specific traits also have considerable impacts on voter decisions.

Abstract: In this paper we study the causal effect of voter confidence on participation decisions in the 2006 Mexican Election. Previous research has shown that voter confidence was a relevant factor in explaining participation during the years of the PRI hegemony. An open question is whether this relationship is still significant after the democratic transition taking place in the years 1997-2000. Moreover, in the previous literature, this problem was studied in a regression framework. In this article we argue that, since voter confidence and participation decisions are affected by similar covariates, a regression approach may lead to results which are too model dependent, and do not account for the heterogeneity of effects across voters. To solve this problem, we use matching methods, and find that voter confidence has considerable effects on participation decisions, but substantially different in magnitude from those found using the usual regression approach.

Abstract: In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions and periodic elections are sponsored by the authoritarian ruler, but voting outcomes are sometimes manipulated to prevent government turnover. In previous literature it has been proposed that, in election taking place under autocratic competition, voters will vote strategically for the hegemonic party, to prevent post-electoral violence as a result of an opposition challenge of unfair electoral results. In this paper, I show that even under the threat of political instability, it is reasonable for voters to follow their sincere preferences in a broad number of cases, depending on the opposition's ability to sustain collective action against the authoritarian regime, as well as its preferences for democracy.