Hayley M. Cohen
PhD, Political Science
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.
Book Chapters
“Running Scared in the Primary: Campaign behavior of safe incumbents in a partisan era.” In The Future of American Primary Elections: Voters, Parties, and Election Reform eds. Robert G. Boatright and Richard Barton. De Gruyter. Forthcoming.
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.”
Under Review
"Encouraging Crossover Voting in the 2024 Presidential Primary" With Daniel Markovits. Revise and Resubmit. Appendix.
Abstract:
Will voters participate in the primary of a party they oppose to prevent the nomination of a candidate they fear? Partnering with a Political Action Committee, we conduct a first-of-its-kind, large, preregistered field experiment (N = 83,800) in the 2024 Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire. A specialized get-out-the-vote intervention increases turnout in the Republican primary among undeclared voters who are modeled as likely to vote for Democratic candidates in general elections. 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. Supplementing our experiment with surveys before and after the primary, we estimate that each vote cast by Democratic-leaning voters in the Republican primary produced a net of 0.75 votes for the relatively moderate Republican primary candidate. We argue that encouragements to crossover vote are an important avenue for bolstering sophisticated,
pro-democracy behavior.
“Primary Concerns: The Lack of Forward-Looking Strategic Voting in Primary Elections"
Abstract:
Do primary voters vote strategically to give their party the best chance of winning the general election? I use six experiments to test whether primary voters in both parties vote for the most “electable” candidate. Though primary voters increase support for candidates they are told have the best chance of winning the general, they do not vote strategically. Instead, the entire positive effect of treatment is derived from voters that have their preconceptions about primary candidates’ chances confirmed. When treatment confirms a voter’s perceptions, it increases support for the more electable candidate. When treatment presents counter-attitudinal information, primary voters are no more or less likely to support the electable candidate. By not voting strategically, primary voters shape parties’ chances of winning general elections and majorities in Congress. These findings set novel limits on elite control of parties and the influence of partisanship, and contradict broader literature on strategic voting.
Working Papers
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”
Abstract:
Even as more of the electoral competition in U.S. elections happens in primary elections, we still know little about a main actor in them: primary campaigns. Though scholars view general election campaigns as influential to election outcomes and voter behavior, no current work examines how primary campaigns act to maximize their candidate’s chances and how those actions influence the composition of the primary electorate. I argue that primary campaigns have unique incentives to invest in persuasion efforts over GOTV strategies because primary campaigns have little information about voters’ intra-party preferences and a greater ability than general election campaigns to persuade voters. I test this argument with 16 in-depth interviews with primary campaign staffers who have worked in a total of 76 campaigns, and a survey of 315 2024 primary campaigns with an embedded conjoint experiment. I find that primary campaigns do not seek to widen the primary electorate by turning out less engaged voters, even when it could be beneficial for their candidate, and instead focus on persuading hyper-involved primary voters. This is because they lack the information to identify supporters among less reliable voters and worry about turning out an opposing candidate’s voters. Though some candidates, like minorities, former office holders, and challengers, may be better able to infer or access information about primary voters’ preferences, it is unclear whether their campaigns embark on a different strategy. Studying the outreach of primary campaigns is integral to understanding which voters make up the primary electorate that, in uncompetitive districts, elect officials, and are better represented by elected officials. Further, this work shows how and when elites are incentivized to keep engagement in elections limited.
“Encouraging Crossover Voting in Congressional Primaries” With Daniel Markovits. (available upon request)
Abstract:
Scholars express widespread concern about the pressure primary elections place on candidates to adopt ideologically extreme positions. 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. This behavior remains rare, even as many elections are only competitive in the primary, leaving voters not of the dominant party without a say in the decisive electoral contest. 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 preregistered survey and field experiments, we find support for all three mechanisms and show that it is feasible to encourage crossover voting in both survey experimental and real-world contexts - and that circumstances of elections dramatically affect voter propensity to crossover. We argue that this hitherto unusual form of voter behavior is necessary for institutional reforms that seek to reduce the polarizing pressure of partisan primaries to realize their goals, and is a key path for voters opposite the majority party in single-party districts to make their vote count.
“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.