Glass Houses and Friends-and-Neighbors Voting: An Exploratory Analysis of the Impact of Political Scandal on Localism

Abstract

The 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama, which was decided on 12 December 2017, was one of the most contentious and scandal-laden political campaigns in recent memory. The Republican candidate, Roy Moore, gained notoriety during the 2017 campaign when a number of women alleged to national media that as teenagers they were subject to sexual advances by Moore, who was then in his early 30s and serving as a local assistant district attorney. The process and results of this particular election provide the heretofore unexamined impact of political scandal on localism or friends-and-neighbors voting in political contests. Based on data from the 2017 special election in Alabama, econometric results presented here suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (e.g., about five percentage points) in his home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.

Editor’s Introduction

“…Finally, my study (Mixon 2018) on the 2017 U.S. Senate Special Election in Alabama extends the public choice literature on localism (i.e., "friends and neighbors") in voting, which occurs as a way of mitigating the agency costs of representative democracy, by investigating the impact on localism of political scandal. Prior literature in this genre places the home area advantage, or the advantage to local candidates, somewhere between 2.4 and 12.4 percentage points, with the most common estimate residing near five percentage points.…”

“…Econometric results presented in Mixon (2018) suggest that a candidate who is embroiled in political scandal suffers an erosion in the usual friends-and-neighbors effect on his or her local vote share in a general election. In this particular case, the scandal hanging over Moore, who lost the election contest to Democratic candidate Doug Jones, eroded all of the friends-and-neighbors effect that would have been expected (i.e., about five percentage points) in Moore's home county, as well as about 40% of the advantage Moore had at home over his opponent in terms of constituent political ideology.…”

Is Political Ideology Stable? Evidence from Long-Serving Members of the United States Congress

“…27 In other words, voters understand and appreciate the implied efficiency of casting ballots in favor of candidates who have much to lose locally from nonperformance in the legislative arena (Kjar and Laband 2002, p. 144). For a look at some of the empirical research on presidential elections from this stream of literature, see Lewis-Beck and Rice (1983), Rice and Macht (1987), Kjar and Laband (2002), Mixon and Tyrone (2004), Disarro et al (2007), Mixon et al (2008), Kahane (2009) and Mixon (2013Mixon ( , 2018. 28 Jackson and Kingdon (1992, p. 813) assert that this issue is exacerbated in the case of a single dimension, as would occur when using League of Conservation Voters scores of political ideology to analyze voting on strip mining legislation.…”

Public Choice

“…Cebula and Mixon (2012) point out that work forms the foundation of scholarly research on voter participation in the U.S. that focuses on whether or not the decision to vote, in general, is rational.26 and also add that the search costs associated with detecting the merits of home district candidates will generally be lower than those associated with discovery of the merits of more distant candidates.27 In other words, voters understand and appreciate the implied efficiency of casting ballots in favor of candidates who have much to lose locally from nonperformance in the legislative arena(Kjar and Laband 2002, p. 144). For a look at some of the empirical research on presidential elections from this stream of literature, see,,,,,, andMixon ( , 2018.28 Jackson and Kingdon (1992, p. 813) assert that this issue is exacerbated in the case of a single dimension, as would occur when using League of Conservation Voters scores of political ideology to analyze voting on strip mining legislation.…”