We explore the effects of state-level election reforms on voter turnout in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections. Using a cost-benefit model of political participation, we develop a framework for analyzing the burdens imposed by the following: universal mail voting, permanent no-excuse absentee voting, nonpermanent no-excuse absentee voting, early in-person voting, Election Day registration, and voter identification requirements. We analyze turnout data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Current Population Surveys and show that implementation by states of both forms of no-excuse absentee voting and Election Day registration has a positive and significant affect on turnout in each election. We find positive but less consistent effects on turnout for universal mail voting and voter identification requirements. Our results also show that early in-person voting has a negative and statistically significant correlation with turnout in all three elections.

This article introduces two newly available sources of data on presidents’ legislative programs. The first consists of administration legislative initiatives cleared by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for submission to Congress. We refer to these records as “OMB logs” because they record OMB’s clearance actions on executive‐branch legislative proposals. The second consists of memoranda, officially called Statements of Administration Policy, that OMB sends to floor leaders detailing the president’s position on legislation pending floor consideration. We compare these new data on presidents’ legislative initiatives and policy preferences with those contained in currently available sources—The Public Papers of the Presidents and Congressional Quarterly’s scoring of presidential positions on roll‐call votes—and with a long available but seldom used fifth source, the Congressional Record. Both new data sources list bills and legislative preferences that are not included in the currently available sources. We illustrate the value of these new data by calculating presidents’ impressive “legislative effectiveness” in the House when all presidential initiatives are taken into account.

This study shows how an informed advisor can use selective information revelation to divert the agenda of a decision maker. An advisor is likely to employ diversion when the decision maker is restricted in the scope of her actions by time, resource, or institutional constraints. The incentive for diversion and the suspicion it engenders in the decision maker reduce the amount of information that can be conveyed by an advisor in two important ways: (1) by expanding the strategic conditions under which no information can be conveyed and (2) by reducing the strategic conditions under which complete information can be conveyed.This study shows how an informed advisor can selectively reveal private information in order to divert the agenda of a decision maker. For example, a lobbyist or bureaucrat armed with policy expertise on two issues might "be selective in the evidence he offers" (Ferkiss 1971) in order to induce the legislature to pursue the lobbyist's or bureaucrat's agenda, rather than the legislature's own salient issue (Deakin 1966;Milbrath 1963;Schlozman and Tierney 1986;Smith 1993). A politician faced with a scandal might release a new policy initiative, while ignoring questions about the scandal, in order to generate coverage of an issue that puts the politician in a more favorable light (see, e.g., Bavelis et al. 1990;Bowers, Elliott, and Desmond 1977;Clayman 2001;Kurtz 1998). And a local informant with valuable knowledge about the location of a common enemy in two possible areas might reveal only one of these locations to a military commander in order to lead the commander into action that promotes the informant's own strategic interests-e.g., with respect to his other rivals-above the objectives of the military official (Conetta 2002;Filkins 2002;Sengupta 2001). In many other cases as well, advisors with expertise on two or more issues can sometimes reveal their information selectively (e.g., on one issue but not the other) in order to divert the attention of a decision maker-e.g., voter, reporter, bureaucrat-away from the decision maker's own salient issue to an issue that is more favorable to the advisor.Opportunities for strategic diversion can arise whenever a decision maker cannot act on all issues at once. This study shows how this incentive for diversion reduces the amount of information that can be conveyed by an informed

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This article reconciles conflicting accounts of Gauss-Markov conditions, which specify when ordinary least squares (OLS) estimators are also best linear unbiased (BLU) estimators. We show that exogeneity constraints that are commonly assumed in econometric treatments of the Gauss-Markov theorem are unnecessary for OLS estimates of the classical linear regression model to be BLU. We also generalize a set of necessary and sufficient conditions first established by McElroy (1967, Journal of the American Statistical Association 62:1302–1304), but not yet generally recognized in the econometric literature, that are appropriate for many political science applications. McElroy's conditions relax the traditional Gauss-Markov restriction on autocorrelation in the errors to allow a type of correlation, exchangeability, that has two desirable characteristics: (1) exchangeable data occur in a potentially important class of political science models, and (2) the form of autocorrelation that occurs in exchangeable data has a ready intuition. We thus show that a common class of sample selection models that does not satisfy the Gauss-Markov conditions specified in econometrics textbooks is, in fact, BLU under OLS estimation.