(with Matthew Atkinson and Seth J. Hill, 2009) Quarterly Journal of Political Science 4 (3), pp 229-249.
Abstract:
We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces. We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. Combining survey data with our facial quality scores and a measure of contest competitiveness, we find a face quality effect for Senate challengers of about 4 points for independent voters and 1 to 3 points for partisans. While we estimate face effects that could potentially matter in close elections, we find that the challenging candidate’s face is never the difference between a challenger and incumbent victory in all 99 Senate elections in our study.
Abstract:
I exploit a natural experiment by which a racial threat effect (Key (1949)) can be identified. Between 2000 and 2004, the reconstruction of public housing in Chicago caused the displacement of over 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. The removal was a largely systematic process, exogenous to the neighborhood of the public housing and even the city. I apply an original method of Bayesian updating to identify the race of voters. Then using individual level, geocoded data for over 800,000 voters I show that after the removal of their African American neighbors, the voter turnout of white voters dropped by over 5 percentage points.
Abstract:
Racial Threat (Key, 1949), the hypothesis that voters will be politically motivated by the presence of a proximate racial outgroup, has been controversial for over 60 years. The effect of racial threat on voter mobilization has been tested using observational data across a number of different geographies and units of analysis. The findings have been inconsistent: some studies demonstrating that the presence of a racial outgroup will increase voter participation and other studies showing no effect. To date, no study of voter mobilization has directly manipulated Racial Threat using a controlled experiment. I take advantage of the racial geography of Los Angeles County, California, which brings different racial/ethnic groups into close, yet spatially separated, proximity. This geography allows for a randomized, controlled field experiment to directly test the effects of stimulating Racial Threat on individual voter turnout. I conduct a test of 3,647 African American and Hispanic voters during the June, 2008 California Primary Election using a direct-mail intervention that was designed to test voters' awareness of the presence of a proximate racial outgroup. The portion of this treatment that is attributable to Racial Threat shows has an effect of 9.6 percentage points for African Americans and no effect for Latinos. These results address several long-standing controversies about the Racial Threat hypothesis.