refereeD publications

An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting (with Chris Johnston and Gabriel Madson) ​Conditionally accepted, QJPS
view summary How well do voters know candidates' issue positions, and to what extent does this knowledge depend on partisan cues? The ability of voters to predict the future policy-related behavior of candidates is essential to a well-functioning representative democracy. But existing studies have difficulty capturing whether citizens can discriminate between co-partisan candidates, who have similar yet meaningfully distinct positions on issues. This article uses incentivized forecasting of candidates' future interest group ratings, which allows for finer distinctions than binary votes on bills. We examine the extent to which citizens can not only identify the typical issue positions of Democrats and Republicans, but also distinguish legislators from the \textit{same} party. We find (1) a strong relationship between citizen's prospective beliefs and candidates' actual positions once elected to office, even when comparing co-partisan legislators, (2) a strong correlation between political interest and accuracy of prospective beliefs, and (3) a negative relationship between the strength of political identity and voters' accuracy.
Jenke, L. (2022). Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief. Political Behavior.
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Jenke, L. (2021.) Introduction to the Special Issue: Innovations and Current Challenges in Experimental Methods. Political Analysis​.
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Jenke, L., Bansak, K., Hainmueller, J., and Hangartner, D. (2021.) Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments.  Political Analysis, 29, ​75-101.
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Jenke, L. and Huettel, S. (2020.) Voter Preferences Reflect a Competition Between Policy and Identity. ​Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2739. 
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Jenke, L.  & Munger, M. (2019.) Attention Distribution as a Measure of Issue Salience. Public Choice, 1-12.
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Jenke, L., & Gelpi, C. (2017.) Theme and Variations: Historical Contingencies in the Causal Model of Interstate Conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(10), 2262-2284.
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Aldrich, J. H., & Jenke, L. M. (2017.) Recent Advances and Prospects for Integration with Theories of Campaigns and Elections. The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion.
view summary The “calculus of voting” is the rational-choice based theory of turnout and vote choice that has been at the base of the choice-theoretic studies of campaigns and elections since its first formal statement by Downs (1957) and especially by Riker and Ordeshook (1968). Perhaps because of its initial formal results about turnout that are ordinarily understood to be both pessimistic and empirically wrong, a number of years passed with relatively little theoretical advancement, while theories of voting, political parties, and campaigns and elections developed, often with little to no attention to the voters’ calculus. In this chapter, after a review of the basics of the calculus of voting with respect to turnout, we consider two relatively new theoretical advances: the development of a fully articulated theory of expressive voting; and specification of the (spatial) utility function, to consider a theoretically coherent account of “abstention due to alienation,” and its relationship to the (spatial) account of moral convictions.
Jenke, L., & Huettel, S. A. (2016.) Issues or identity? Cognitive foundations of voter choice. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(11), 794-804.
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WORKING PAPERS

​An Eye-Tracking Study of Candidate Gender's Impact on Information Search in Candidate Evaluations ​Under review
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view summary Research shows that gender stereotypes impact voters' evaluations of candidates. But this research rarely takes into account the ways that voters search for and process information, assuming that all types of candidate information receive equal attention regardless of the candidates' genders. This paper explores whether citizens search for information about candidates differently based on candidate gender, favoring certain information types when the candidate is female and other types when the candidate is male. It does so using a novel way to measure information acquisition: eye-tracking. The results indicate that citizens do not differentiate their information search by candidate gender, nor is their evaluation of candidates dependent on the candidates' gender. This finding has implications for the design of experiments testing the impacts of candidate gender on candidate evaluation.
Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Design: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior (with Kirk Bansak) ​Under review
The Impact of Joe Biden's Running Mate Selection on Prospective Voters (with Jon Krosnick) Under review
view summary Prior work has found that attitudes towards vice-presidential candidates are predictive of voters’ candidate choices in presidential elections. But few studies have examined the impact of vice-presidential candidates’ race and sex on voter behavior. This article describes a probability survey (the 2020 ANES Time Series Study) and an experiment embedded in a high-quality nonprobability survey (N = 3,234) that explored whether the race and sex of the Democratic vice-presidential candidate influenced voter turnout and candidate choice. Consistent with past studies of vice-presidential candidates, voters’ ratings of Ms. Harris were significantly associated with voter behavior in 2020. But our experimental results imply that her sex and race were not directly responsible for this relationship, even among people high in racism, people high in sexism, African Americans, and females. That said, the vice-presidential candidate’s race did affect candidate choice indirectly: selection of an African American running mate improved voters’ perceptions of Joe Biden’s personality attributes, which in turn increased intentions to vote for him. These provide useful evidence consistent with the claim that running mate attributes can indirectly affect voter behavior and electoral outcomes.
Measuring Gender Bias in Elections (with Jon Krosnick, Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, and Emily West) ​Under review
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view summary Discussions regarding sexism have been prominent in U.S. politics in recent years. Yet, scholars rely on measures of sexism that do not explicitly consider how gendered beliefs regarding the most important political leadership characteristics may affect vote choice. We introduce a new measure, leadership sexism, that considers whether voters have gendered trait perceptions on candidate traits that have been identified as relevant for political leadership. Leadership sexism taps elements of sexism distinct from commonly used measures. Moreover, the choice of measure affects whether researchers conclude that voters' gender attitudes are consequential with respect to vote choice. Leadership sexism is consistently predictive of vote choice in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, whereas other measures of sexism are not. Without considering a comprehensive set of sexism measures, including leadership sexism, scholars runs the risk of under-estimating the import of gender attitudes in elections.