Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

We provide a comprehensive assessment of the influence of television advertising on United States election outcomes from 2000–2018. We expand on previous research by including presidential, Senate, House, gubernatorial, Attorney General, and state Treasurer elections and using both difference-in-differences and border-discontinuity research designs to help identify the causal effect of advertising. We find that televised broadcast campaign advertising matters up and down the ballot, but it has much larger effects in down-ballot elections than in presidential elections. Using survey and voter registration data from multiple election cycles, we also show that the primary mechanism for ad effects is persuasion, not the mobilization of partisans. Our results have implications for the study of campaigns and elections as well as voter decision making and information processing.

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

Technology and the decreased cost of survey research have made it possible for researchers to collect data using new and varied modes of interview. These data are often analyzed as if they were generated using similar processes, but the modes of interview may produce differences in response simply due to the presence or absence of an interviewer. In this paper, we explore the differences in item non-response that result from different modes of interview and find that mode makes a difference. The data are from an experiment in which we randomly assigned an adult population to an in-person or self-completed survey after subjects agreed to participate in a short poll. For nearly every topic and format of question, we find less item non-response in the self-complete mode. Furthermore, we find the difference across modes in non-response is exacerbated for respondents with low levels of cognitive abilities. Moving from high to low levels of cognitive ability, an otherwise average respondent can be up to six times more likely to say “don’t know” in a face-to-face interview than in a self-completed survey, depending on the type of question.

Analysts of cluster-randomized field experiments have an array of estimation techniques to choose from. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we evaluate the properties of point estimates and standard errors (SEs) generated by ordinary least squares (OLS) as applied to both individual-level and cluster-level data. We also compare OLS to alternative random effects estimators, such as generalized least squares (GLS). Our simulations assess efficiency across a variety of scenarios involving varying sample sizes and numbers of clusters. Our results confirm that conventional OLS SEs are severely biased downward and that, for all estimators, gains in efficiency come mainly from increasing the number of clusters, not increasing the number of individuals within clusters. We find relatively minor differences across alternative estimation approaches, but GLS seems to enjoy a slight edge in terms of the efficiency of its point estimates and the accuracy of its SEs. We illustrate the application of alternative estimation approaches using a clustered experiment in which Rock the Vote TV advertisements were used to encourage young voters in 85 cable TV markets to vote in the 2004 presidential election.

Prior research demonstrates that many citizens are unable to perceive differences between the two major political parties. In order to investigate whether candidate behavior in campaigns contributes to this perception, we test implications about partisan constraints on campaign rhetoric drawn from the literature on parties and policy convergence. Our results suggest that candidates of different parties do not highlight the same issues or positions in their campaign advertising. We find that campaign rhetoric is strongly motivated by party even when controlling for constituency characteristics and other factors. Thus, there is convergence among candidates of the same party across districts and states and divergence between opposing candidates within districts and states. Our results are based on a detailed content analysis of more than 1,000 campaign advertisements aired by 290 candidates in 153 elections in 37 states during the 1998 midterm elections.

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depending on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy. It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have more time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We tested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test results in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.