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In their reply to our article, "Irrelevant Events and Voting Behavior," Fowler and Montagnes reanalyze our replication study of college football's effect on election outcomes. Although we agree with Fowler and Montagnes that the evidence supporting the irrelevant events hypothesis is weaker than earlier research suggested, they overstate this case. Philosophically, we disagree with Fowler and Montagnes's preference for (1) running a plethora of tests rather than focusing on the most theoretically motivated tests and (2) privileging out-of-sample data over the full sample of available data. Empirically, we show that their claim that out-of-sample data weaken the original results depends on (1) an incorrect definition of out-of-sample years and (2) assigning two-thirds weight to the same hypothesis regarding heterogeneous effects. An amended version of Fowler and Montagnes's analysis affirms our initial assessment: although the original finding was overstated, adding out-of-sample data strengthens it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and punish incumbents for "irrelevant events." The empirical literature on this topic is characterized by conflicting findings. Drawing on ideas from the open science movement, and showing how they can advance the transparency of observational research, we replicated three prominent studies on irrelevant events and voting behavior: (1) Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels's 2016 study of droughts and floods; (2) Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo's 2010 study of college football; and (3) Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra's 2010 study of tornadoes. Each study replicates well in some areas and poorly in others. Had we sought to debunk any of the three with ex post specification searches, we could have done so. However, our approach required us to see the full, complicated picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political scientists regularly measure anti-Black prejudice in the survey context using racial resentment, an indirect measure that blends racial animus with traditional moral values. Explicit prejudice, a direct measure based in beliefs about the group-level inferiority of Blacks, is used less frequently. We investigate whether these attitudes predict anti-Black discrimination and evaluations of the fairness of intergroup inequality. Study 1 used the Ultimatum Game to obtain a behavioral measure of racial discrimination and found whites engaged in anti-Black discrimination. Explicit prejudice explained which whites discriminated, whereas resentment did not. In study 2, white third-party observers evaluated intergroup interactions in the Ultimatum Game, and explicit prejudice explained racially biased fairness evaluations, but resentment did not. This demonstrates that resentment and prejudice are distinct constructs and that explicit prejudice has clear behavioral implications. We also find that explicit prejudice is widespread among white Americans and significantly less partisan than resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that lead both to incarceration and to low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on turnout in presidential elections has shown that "battleground" state status has modest effects on turnout, raising the question of why individuals vote even in noncompetitive states. We present experimental evidence showing that the typically small effect of battleground status on turnout may be tied to the fact that voting norms are insensitive to whether a given individual's vote is likely to affect the outcome of an election. Instead, variability in the social rewards to voting are more closely tied to the behaviors of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do people form relationships based upon political similarity? Past work has shown that social relationships are more politically similar than expected by chance, but the reason for this concordance is unclear. Is it because people prefer politically similar others, or is it attributable to confounding factors such as convergence, social structures, and sorting on nonpolitical characteristics? Addressing this question is challenging because we typically do not observe partners prior to relationship formation. Consequently, we leverage the domain of online dating. We first conducted a nationwide experiment in which we randomized political characteristics in dating profiles. Second, we analyzed behavioral data from a national online dating community. We find that people evaluate potential dating partners more favorably and are more likely to reach out to them when they have similar political characteristics. The magnitude of the effect is comparable to that of educational homophily and half as large as racial homophily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If voters punish elected officials who adopt incongruent policy positions, then representatives should take popular positions to avoid electoral sanction. Yet, scholars have noted gaps between citizen preferences and the behavior of elected officials. We argue that one important source of this gap is that individual citizens believe they are sometimes not well qualified to evaluate policy. Our analysis of a series of experiments shows that citizens’ stated confidence in their own ability to evaluate a policy proposal substantially affects their willingness to reward or punish a representative for their votes on that policy. Our results hold both across individuals (within policy areas) and within individuals (across policy areas) and suggest that, rather than a failure of representation, gaps between citizen preferences and policy may reflect citizen deference to “expert” legislators. We also show that understanding differences in policy confidence has important implications for understanding the contours of public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from two recent surveys, we analyze the relationship between Big Five personality traits and political participation. We examine forms of participation that differ in domain (local politics vs. national campaigns) as well as in the amount of conflict involved, whether they are likely to yield instrumental benefits, and whether they are likely to be viewed as a duty—characteristics that may affect the relationships between dispositional personality traits and political activity. We find relationships between personality traits and: (1) both self-reported and actual turnout (measured using administrative records), (2) overreporting of turnout, and (3) a variety of other modes of participation. The effect of personality on political participation is often comparable to the effects of factors that are central in earlier models of turnout, such as education and income. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, these relationships vary depending on personality-relevant characteristics of each participatory act. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Governments are charged with monitoring citizens' compliance with prescribed behavioral standards and punishing noncompliance. Flaws in information available to enforcing agents, however, may lead to subsequent enforcement errors, eroding government authority and undermining incentives for compliance. We explore these concepts in a laboratory experiment. A ''monitor'' player makes punishment decisions after receiving noisy signals about other players' choices to contribute to a public good. We find that the possibility of wrongly accusatory signals has a more deleterious effect on contribution levels than the possibility of wrongly exculpatory signals. We trace this across-treatment difference to a ''false positives trap'': when members of a largely compliant population are sometimes incorrectly accused, some will be unjustly punished if enforcement power is employed, but noncompliant individuals will escape punishment if that power is abdicated. Either kind of error discourages compliance. An additional treatment demonstrates that the functioning of a given enforcement institution may vary, depending on its origins. We consider implications of our findings for theories of deterrence, fairness, and institutional legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]