Informing Electorates via Election Law: An Experimental Study of Partisan Endorsements and Nonpartisan Voter Guides in Local Elections

Abstract

Many legal scholars and political practitioners advocate using election law to increase voters' access to political information, either by providing such information directly on ballots or in ballot pamphlets. To date, however, little empirical evidence exists to guide policymakers and judges charged with weighing the benefits of such legal interventions against any costs they might impose. We address this gap by conducting survey experiments to examine three types of political information that legal interventions can make available or withhold: political party endorsements, endorsements from prominent public officials, and a nonpartisan voter guide describing candidates' policy positions. Our results provide evidence that such legal interventions can yield tangible benefits-namely, helping voters choose candidates whose policy views are similar to their own.

Racial or Spatial Voting? The Effects of Candidate Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Endorsements in Local Elections

“…Scholars in recent years have developed methods for creating comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie , ; Jessee ; Joesten and Stone ; Shor and Rogowski ) . One method combines candidates’ known policy views with surveys that ask voters whether they support those policies.…”

The Effect of Associative Racial Cues in Elections

“…The findings from this paper also add nuance to the cross-racial mobilization literature, which largely uses observational analyses to assess the successes and failures of candidates in high-profile elections. The present paper, which relies on experimental analyses and a lowsalience election, shows that cues may operate differently in elections of varying degrees of salience (Bernhard and Freeder, 2018;Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie, 2015a;2015b).…”

Trust, Communication, and Information after The Democratic Dilemma

“…For example, Arceneaux and Kolodny (2009) showed that politically uninformed Republicans can use a liberal interest group’s endorsement to help them choose candidates who share their partisanship. Similarly, Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie (2015) demonstrated that endorsements from political parties and well-known politicians with ideological reputations help uninformed citizens to make decisions that are comparable to those who are informed. An open question for future research is whether and when other types of endorsements—particularly those from politically active groups whose ideological reputations are less clear (e.g., law enforcement organizations)—provide citizens with substitutes for the political information that they lack.…”