Voting Second Midterm

Fire alarms vs. police patrols

Analogy to explain how people view political information. Instead of constantly patrolling the neighborhood, they wait until someone (i.e. the media) sets off a fire alarm. If the media can be trusted to raise the alarm, then this system potentially works.

Importance: Gives journalists lots of power (agenda-setting), if they don’t tell you about something, you won’t know

By-product learning

There used to be way fewer media options, so lots of people watched the same thing. If you wanted to watch TV at 5:30 on a Wednesday night, you would have to watch the news. So, people would absorb political content as a by product of being interested in television

Importance: Now, we live in a “post-broadcast” democracy. With so much choice, there is way less by-product learning.

Also connected to the idea that with so much choices, our news is much more polarized now. You could say that as a by-product of there being so few options, everyone absorbed the same, moderate ones.

“Hostile media” perception

Despite little evidence of ideological bias in the mainstream media, people believe that the media is biased against them. In a study, people shown the same media clip who thought it was from different sources thought it was biased in different ways. “Motivated reasoning” — fit your conclusiosn to your preexisting views.

IMPORTANCE?

Two-step flow of communication

News sources reach viewers, but those viewers pass the info on to more people. “Opinion leaders” interpret and share information to others.

Importance: Media outlets can have a much bigger sphere of influence than just their direct viewers.

Hypodermic Needle Model

Idea that the media injects us with opinions. Comes from theories about how Nazi propaganda was so effective.

Importance: This hasn’t quite been borne out, it seems that the effect of the media is closer to agenda setting: The media doesn’t tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about.

Agenda Setting

The media doesn’t tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about. The media decides what we talk about and how we know about it. Most of the things we know about the world come from the media.

Importance: The media has lots of power in what we know — and what we don’t know. Like FDR’s polio.

Digital ads

Digital ad spending was about 14.5% in 2023

Harris spent waaaay more on digital ads than Trump did, and this has been a thing for a little while. This is things like meta, google, etc.

Importance: digital ad spending is a rising part of advertisements, but it’s being used differently by different people. It’s not necessarily more or less effective than other types, but it’s especially about the type of audience that it reaches.

Funnel of causality

Describes the ways different things affect our votes. Some things, like social divisions, have less of an effect, whereas issue positions and candidate image have more of an effect

Tik Tok News

More and more Americans are getting their news from Tik Tok: 20% of Americans do, but 55% of Tik Tok users get news on the platform

Trust in Media

Democrats have remained pretty stable, from 65% to around 50% since 1975. Republican trust has majroly dropped, from about 40% to around 10%. Connect this to “hostile media” perception. Local news is more trustworthy than national news, especially for republicans

Counter-factual 1968 election

In the study about agenda-seeding, the author asks what would have happened in the 1968 election if the violent civil rights protests had not occurred after MLK’s death. Based on the effect of violent protests that he finds, his data suggests that Hubert Humphrey may have one the election. Shows the effect of political violence.

Persuasiveness and backlash

Article about who’s persuasive — worry that senders would actually make receivers more entrenched in their positions. Wasn’t really borne out — backlash was around 11%, and not distinguishable from measurement error. 30% of receivers, on the other hand, were persuaded.P

Perspective Taking

Who’s persuasive. Perspective taking was the ability of senders to understand the experiences, desires, and beliefs of others/

Importance: Perspective taking was correlated with more efficacious persuasion.

Downsian Model

From Who Leads, Who Follows. Model suggests that officials running for office will try to appeal to the most central voters, so in essence, it will be a ‘race to the middle.’ The idea is that the middle voter is the most important voter.

Importance: What they find is that actually, elected officials respond to the most attentive/engaged citizens.

Congruence

A score describing the number of districts covered by a single newspaper. A score of 1 suggests that all readers reside in the same district. If readers are spread evenly across two districts, the score will be 0.5, suggesteing that the voters are split between two districts.

High congruence —> more information about candidates —> partisanship is less important in determining votes.

Implicit party identification

Study looked at how easily people associate words like “me” and “my” and “they” and “others” with each party. Lots of alignment with explicit party identification.

Importance: GOP identity gap

GOP Identity Gap

Republicans have a stronger implicit party identification than democrats, i.e., they are farther from independents than democrats are.

Importance: from a democratic side, it might be useful to explore what republicans do and try to do thatG

Gini coefficiant

Describes the distribution of wealth. 0=even distribution of wealth; 1=complete inequality.

Importance: politicians are most polarized in places that are most unequal; more liberal democrats, more conservative republicans

Descriptive representation

One of two traditional forms of representation. Describes whether the demographic make up of elected officials mirrors the community.

Importance: Taylor argues that poor people aren’t necessarily clambering to elect poor people. Lower affluent people are under represented in congress.Su

Substantive type of representation

Describes whether the policies passed by elected officials are in line with what different demographics want. It’s harder to measure, because you have to know what different groups want, and it assumes that groups are homogenous.

Importance: Taylor finds that poorer groups are not homogenous’ its’s not that poor people just want liberal policies.

Gerrymander and the less affluent

Taylor addresses the idea that maybe our districts are gerrymandered to ‘pack’ less affluent people into fewer districts, diluting their representation in congress. In fact, he finds that if anyone is ‘packed,’ it is the wealthy. Most districts have median incomes below the national average.

Legislative effectiveness

Capacity of legislators to turn their policy preferences into outcomes. Taylor measures it by looking at the number of ‘substantive’ bills that elected officials get passed. He finds legislators from lower income districts do pass fewer bills, but only because they introduce fewer bills. This could be because they are more focused on ‘bringing home more bacon for the district.’ These might not be bills, but grants, funding apparatuses, etc.

Minimum turnout requirements

Suggestion that adding minimum turnout requirements would increase the strength of our elections. Democracies rely on people actually voting, and voter turnout in the US is pretty low compared to many other developed nations.

Importance: logistically challenging. What should the bar be? (percentage? margin-of-victory? a hybrid?) What happens if you don’t meet the bar?`

Compulsory voting

Idea that a nation should pass laws to make voting mandatory. Has large effects: 7-20 points.

Importance: Studies show that compulsory voting only increases turnout of the state imposes penalties for not voting AND has the state capacity to enforce these penalties.

Also, it doesn’t change the culture — remove compulsory voting, and people will go back

State capacity

Ability of a state to follow through on its goals. Measured by the proxy neonatal death rates — higher death rates can mean lower capacity.

Importance: states need to be able to impose penalties and actually follow through on them to be able to successfully enact compulsory voting.

Psychosocial skills

Psychosocial skills are ‘soft skills’ like the ability to work with others, communicate clearly, deal with conflict. A study looked at the Fast Track intervention, which fosters psychosocial skills, and found that completion of the program increased turnout by up to 14 percentage points. That’s pretty huge!
Importance: we can increase turnout by teaching psychosocial skills.

ESSAY: Agenda Seeding

Protests can seed the agenda, but the positive/negative effects depend on the violence of the protests

ESSAY: Impact of Partisan Media

Two step flow of communication. Partisan media spreads not just to viewers, but through conversations that the viewers have. This aligns with the “Who’s persuasive” study, which shows that people are pretty good at convincing others of their positions.

Findings of the Catalist Report

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Race and representation

Descriptive representation, substantive representation, who wins and who loses. Black voters are losing most of the time. The one time they are super successful is in house races.

Representation of the less affluent

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