refereeD publicationsJenke, L., Johnston, C., and Madson, G. (2023.) An Assessment of Citizens' Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting Quarterly Journal of Political Science
view summaryThe 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 distinguishing between detailed knowledge of individual candidates and the use of coarse partisan cues when making prospective judgments. This article uses incentivized forecasting of candidates' future interest group ratings, which allows for finer distinctions than yea or nay 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 between co-partisan legislators. First, we find a strong relationship between citizen's prospective beliefs and candidates' actual positions once elected to office. Further, we find that many of these relationships persist even when comparing candidates of the same party. This suggests that a meaningful portion of citizens go beyond party cues to distinguish the ideological extremity of individual candidates for office. Comparing accuracy across citizens, we find a strong correlation between respondents' political interest and the accuracy of their prospective beliefs, and a negative relationship between respondents' strength of political identification and accuracy.Jenke, L. (2021.) Introduction to the Special Issue: Innovations and Current Challenges in Experimental Methods. Political Analysis.
view paper 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.
view paper Jenke, L. and Huettel, S. (2020.) Voter Preferences Reflect a Competition Between Policy and Identity. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2739.
view paper Jenke, L. & Munger, M. (2019.) Attention Distribution as a Measure of Issue Salience. Public Choice, 1-12.
view paper 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.
view paper 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 summaryThe “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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UNDER REVIEWAn Eye-Tracking Study of Candidate Gender's Impact on Information Search in Candidate Evaluations R&R at Political Psychology
view summaryResearch 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.Prediction and Cumulative Knowledge in the Social Sciences (with Pablo Beramendi, Scott De Marchi, Max Gallop, and Scott Page) Under contract at Cambridge University Press
Odd Profiles in Conjoint Experimental Design: Effects on Survey-Taking Attention and Behavior (with Kirk Bansak)
The Impact of Joe Biden's Running Mate Selection on Prospective Voters (with Jon Krosnick)
view summaryDid the fact that Kamala Harris is a Black woman influence evaluations of Joe Biden, turnout, and candidate choice in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? This paper reports two empirical investigations. First, data from the 2020 American National Election Study show that attitudes toward Ms. Harris predicted turnout and candidate choice, controlling for an array of other plausible causes. Second, a novel, ecologically valid experiment embedded in a national non-probability sample survey ($N$ = 3,234) tested whether varying the race and gender of the vice-presidential nominee (using actual potential candidates) influenced turnout and candidate choice. Ms. Harris’ race and gender did not influence turnout or candidate choice directly (even among people high in racism, people high in sexism, Black people, and female respondents) but did so indirectly by shaping attitudes toward Mr. Biden. This is the first demonstration that these demographic characteristics of vice-presidential nominees influence evaluations of presidential nominees.Measuring Gender Bias in Elections (with Jon Krosnick, Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, and Emily West)
view summaryAcross the social sciences, several different measures have been developed to assess sexism, including the modern sexism, ambivalent sexism, and social role sexism scales, as well as implicit attitude measures. We introduce another measure---leadership sexism---that is especially predictive of an important outcome in the study of political behavior: candidate choices. This measure focuses on whether an individual holds gender stereotypes with respect to personality traits viewed as important to voters when considering political leaders. Leveraging two national surveys, we demonstrate that leadership sexism is a useful addition to scholars' toolbox for understanding the role of gender attitudes in shaping voting behavior. Leadership sexism taps a type of sexism distinct from commonly used sexism measures. Moreover, leadership sexism predicts vote choice in U.S. presidential elections, even if the election does not feature a female candidate, suggesting that prejudicial attitudes against women widely influence contemporary American politics.Predicting Anti-Institutionalism in Member of Congress' Tweets (with Scott De Marchi, Michael Ensley, Max Gallop, and Shahryar Minhas)
view summaryAnti-institutional rhetoric has been increasing on both sides of the political spectrum in the United States. We offer a new measure of anti-institutionalism that uses a natural language processing approach based on large language models (LLMs) to code House members' tweets as anti-institutional or not and test a number of factors that may influence members' likelihood of engaging in anti-institutional rhetoric. Our results indicate that constituents' characteristics such as partisan and ideological extremity do not play much of a role in determining House members' anti-institutional rhetoric. But members' own partisanship correlates strongly with their number of anti-institutional tweets. Collectively, our results imply that the rise in anti-institutional rhetoric among elites is rooted mostly in a change in the behavior of elected officials rather than in the growing clamor of a discontented populace.working papersPredicting Measurement Error Bias in Conjoint Survey Experiments (with Gary King)
Experimental Manipulations of Affective Polarization: A Design-Based Evaluation of Key Assumptions (with Donald Green) Does Affective Polarization Undermine Support for Democratic Norms? (with Diana Mutz) Interactive Effects in Conjoint Experiments (with Kirk Bansak) Attention and Political Choice: A Foundation for Eye Tracking in Political Science (with Nicolette Sullivan) |