A. The tables and figures that follow rely on the U.S. Supreme Court Database's definitions of “conservative” and “liberal.” The definitions mostly comport with conventional understandings. “Liberal” votes are those in favor of defendants in criminal cases; of women and minorities in civil rights cases; of individuals against the government in First Amendment, privacy, and due process cases; of...

N important question in political economy A.’ ts how, if at all, economic events affect voting behavior. Although there is by now a fairly large literature devoted to this question,’ there is no widely agreed upon answer. Kramer (1971), for example, concluded from his analysis of U.S. voting behavior that economic fluctuations have an important influence on congressional elections, whereas Stig...

This article reports new empirical evidence on probabilistic polling, which asks persons to state in percent-chance terms the likelihood that they will vote and for whom. Before the 2008 presidential election, seven waves of probabilistic questions were administered biweekly to participants in the American Life Panel (ALP). Actual voting behavior was reported after the election. We find that re...

People are regularly asked to report on their likelihoods of carrying out consequential future behaviors, including complying with medical advice, completing educational assignments, and voting in upcoming elections. Despite these stated self-predictions being notoriously unreliable, they are used to inform many strategic decisions. We report two studies examining stated self-prediction about w...

Trusted voting clients for Internet voting systems are difficult to implement in most hosts running general-purpose operating systems, such as Windows or Linux. The complexity of these systems and the degree of freedom in their configuration makes it nearly impossible to assure the correct behavior of a local voting client application. Therefore, critical parts of client voting applications sho...

This paper presents experiments analyzing the strategic behavior of voters under three voting systems: plurality rule, approval voting, and the Borda count. Strategic behavior is significantly different under each treatment (voting system). Plurality rule leads voters to play in a more sophisticated manner, but not necessarily insincerely, displaying the lowest levels of manipulation. The oppos...

This paper uses prefecture-level panel data from Japan, spanning the period 1989–2003, to examine the influence of social norms and fractionalization on voting behavior. The key findings obtained from analysis via the fixed effects estimation, which controls for unobserved prefecture-specific fixed effects, are as follows: (1) the voter turnout is higher in close-knit communities, indicating th...