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Peer Reviewed Publications

Encouraging Black and Latinx Radio Audiences to Register to Vote: A Field Experiment” 2023. With Jose Gomez, Donald Green, Gregory Huber, Joseph Sutherland and Michelle Zee. American Politics Research 51(5): 559-569

Abstract: Low voter registration rates represent an impediment to voting, especially among ethnic minority groups. Traditional in-person voter registration drives increase registration rates in minority communities but became infeasible during the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic. An alternative approach is to promote registration through mass media, such as local radio. We present results from a large-scale experiment testing the effects of radio ads on voter registration. During the run up to the November 2020 election, we identified 186 radio stations with predominantly Latinx or African American audiences; fifty randomly selected stations were assigned to a week-long advertising campaign each week for three weeks. Nonpartisan messages encouraged voter registration by stressing the importance of the election and featured celebrity voices. The number of new registrants rose slightly in treated areas during the week when the ads aired.  No further gains were apparent one or two weeks later. 

Working Papers


“Primary Concerns: The Lack of Forward-Looking Strategic Voting in Primary Elections"

Abstract: 

A few districts and states with competitive general elections now decide control of congressional chambers. In these closely contested generals, the identities of parties’ nominees can win or lose the election. As such, we must think about elections in these districts as a single, two-stage game beginning with the primary. Yet we do not know whether primary voters think about primary elections as a first stage that affects the second stage. Do primary voters vote strategically to give their party the best chance of winning the general election? I use six experiments to investigate the willingness of primary voters in both parties to vote for the most “electable” candidate. I findthat, though primary voters increase support for candidates they are told have the best chance of winning the general election, they do not vote strategically. Instead, the entire positive effect of treatment is derived from voters that have their preconceptions about electability confirmed. When treatment confirms a voter’s perceptions about primary candidates’ general election chances, treatment increases support for the more electable candidate enormously. When treatment presents counter-attitudinal information about electability, primary voters are less likely to support the more electable candidate. That primary voters do not vote strategically runs counter to work on strategic voting in general elections, and suggests novel limits on party elites’ ability to control their chances in general elections and the influence of partisan concerns on voter behavior. Future research will explore why primary voters do not switch support to the more electable candidate: are primary voters spurred to change their preferred candidate’s chances or are they motivated reasoners who reject counter-attitudinal information?

"Running Scared in the Primary: Campaign behavior of safe incumbents in a partisan era"

Abstract:

Over the last few decades, partisanship in the electorate has strengthened and the number of competitive congressional districts has shrunk. Now, the vast majority of incumbents are overwhelmingly likely to be re-elected in general elections simply because their party affiliation matches that of their district. Despite this decrease in electoral competitiveness, incumbents who are heavily advantaged to win their general elections still campaign vigorously, raising more money each cycle and allocating more time and staff to campaigning. I posit that these ”safe” incumbents continue to campaign vigorously to project strength to deter strong candidates from challenging them in the only remaining election that could be competitive: the primary. These incumbents would rather deter these challengers from entering the race than risk facing them in the primary when voters are not tied by partisanship to the incumbent. Using fundraising data from House of Representative elections from 2002 to 2018, I show that these incumbents use fundraising to project strength to outside political actors, are less concerned with projecting strength during the primary and general election campaigns, and are most concerned with projecting strength before the candidacy filing deadline. Using data on primary challenger entry dates, I also show that primary challengers announce their campaigns after receiving cues about incumbents’ strength from fundraising data. Incumbents with safe general elections still campaign vigorously because they are “running scared.”

 
 

"Encouraging Crossover Voting in the 2024 Presidential Primary" With Daniel Markovits. 

Abstract:

Will voters participate in the opposing party's presidential primary to prevent an anti-democratic candidate from winning that party's nomination? We investigated this question by partnering with an advocacy group to conduct a first-of-its-kind, large, preregistered field experiment (N = 83,800), in the lead-up to the 2024 Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire. We find that a specialized get-out-the-vote intervention increases turnout in the Republican primary among a subset of undeclared voters who are modeled as Democrats. Our treatment increased Republican Primary turnout in this sample by 1.6 percentage points while reducing turnout in the Democratic Primary by 0.5 percentage points. In previous surveys conducted by our partner organization, self-identified Democrats supported the pro-democratic candidate at 86 percent, meaning this increased Republican primary turnout implies increased support for the pro-democratic candidate. Consistent with preregistered expectations, we find that higher levels of contact were modestly more effective in generating turnout, and treatment was more effective for more educated voters. We argue that encouragements to crossover vote are an important avenue for bolstering sophisticated, pro-democracy behavior in the electorate, especially among informed voters and some subsets of partisans.

“Connecting the Vote: Evaluating the effect of Peer Encouragement on Turnout in the 2020 Election” With Donald Green. 

Abstract: Friend-to-friend voter mobilization is a theoretically promising but understudied tactic. The present study reports the results of a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the effects of a distributed voter mobilization drive in which high school- and college-age "captains'' around the country encouraged turnout among people they know. Without stringent structures for captains to provide data about their friends, only half provide accurate information that can be matched to the voter file, leading to high rates of attrition. Still, we find little effect of friend-to-friend mobilization, despite past studies demonstrating large results. This study illustrates the limitations of friend-to-friend mobilization when conducted without close oversight of captains, during high salience elections, and among those captains whose friends are already likely to be politically active.

“Who you gonna call? How primary campaigns conduct voter outreach” (available upon request)

Abstract: Though scholars have examined the impact of campaign activity on general election outcomes, little work examines the impact of campaign activity in primary elections. Specifically, which voters do primary campaigns contact? What information do they communicate? And what is the effect of this outreach on who votes in primary elections? Work on general election campaigns may not extend to primaries; primary campaigns have fewer resources and a greater ability to persuade voters. This paper explores the unique incentives of primary campaigns to split their outreach efforts between persuasion and GOTV. First, I develop hypotheses for when primary campaigns should invest in persuasion over GOTV, and which voters they should contact for each. Second, I test these hypotheses against the practices of campaigns with 16 in-depth interviews of primary campaign staffers who have worked in a total of 76 races with 98 years of experience. Third, I test these hypotheses using a survey of all 2024 primary campaigns for federal, statewide and state senate offices in 40 states. With an embedded conjoint experiment that asks respondents how they would run hypothetical campaigns, this survey ascertains not only how current primary campaigns operate but how campaign strategy would change in different districts and for candidates with different identities. I find that primary campaigns do not seek to widen the primary electorate even when it could be beneficial for their candidate, instead seeking to persuade hyper-involved primary voters. The one exception to this rule is candidates of color, who seek to turn out co-ethnic and co-racial voters of any level of engagement. This work illuminates the elite side to low primary turnout, and the composition of the primary electorate. 

“Encouraging Crossover Voting in Congressional Primaries” With Daniel Markovits. (available upon request)

 

Abstract: 

Scholars and journalists are increasingly concerned about the rise of extremist nominees in primary elections. And yet in at least 17 open primary states, swathes of ideologically diverse voters are eligible to participate in primaries of parties with which they do not identify. Yet this behavior remains rare, even as voters' fears of extremism and democratic backsliding in the opposing party mount. Why? We propose three explanations. First, voters believe that participating in opposing party primaries goes against their affective partisan instincts and their understanding of democratic norms. Second, candidates running in primaries may not be sufficiently appealing to opposing partisans to motivate crossover voting. Third, campaigns may not make efforts to encourage crossover voting. Across four pre-registered survey and field experiments, we find support for all three mechanisms and show that crossover voting can be encouraged in both survey experimental and real-world contexts. We argue that this unusual form of voter behavior offers the opportunity to restrain extremism in intra-party elections and that behavioral changes rather than institutional reforms are a viable short-term solution to mitigating polarization.

“Homevoters on the statewide stage: Does homeownership change participation in state elections?”

Winner of Best Graduate Student Poster at State Politics and Policy Conference 2024.

Abstract: How does homeownership affect citizens’ political behavior at multiple levels of government? The local politics literature finds that homeownership creates “homevoters,” savvy political actors in local politics who engage in costly forms of participation around issues of zoning and land use. This is contrary to much of the literature studying state and national politics that finds voters largely difficult to turn out and inattentive to politics. Meanwhile, the issue that prompts homeowners to get involved local politics, zoning, has been increasingly discussed and legislated at higher levels of government, with multiple states outlawing single family zoning and requiring comprehensive rezoning. This paper studies the implication of state action on zoning issues on homeowners’ political behavior. Specifically, does state legislation on zoning policy increase engagement in state elections among homeowners? This paper uses CES survey data, and a matching and difference in differences design to examine these questions.

Works in Progress

“How stable is the primary electorate?”

“What do voters know about primary candidates?”

 

"The mobilizing effect of bad polling in primaries"
 

Other Writing

Cohen, Hayley, Meredith Conroy, and Alexander Agadjanian. 2018. data for politics #20: A #MeToo Effect? Attitudes about Gender Equality and Workplace Harassment.” Data for Progress.

 

Cohen, Hayley, Peter Levin, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Jodi Benenson, and Noorya Haya. 2018. The Impact of National Service on Employment Outcomes.” Corporation for National and Community Service. March 2018.

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