Skip to content

Research

Research Profiles and Databases:

ResearcherID

ORCid

SSRN

Research Gate

Recent Research:

Nonseparable Preferences and Overtime Instability in Survey Responses. Abstract: The conventional wisdom in political science holds that most people lack real opinions on political issues. The most enduring evidence for this claim is the low correlation in individuals' issue positions over time as measured by public opinion surveys. Reanalysis of this evidence shows that less than ten percent of respondents change their issue positions significantly over time in panel surveys from the 1950s through the 2000s. Large changes in responses by a small percentage of respondents produce the overall low correlations in responses used by researchers since Converse (1964) to claim that most people lack meaningful political attitudes or that survey responses display large amounts of random error. If respondents' preferences are defined over sets of issues, and if some respondents have nonseparable preferences across these issues, then survey responses will change over time even if underlying opinions do not. Panel surveys reveal that much of the US public has nonseparable preferences on several issues. People with nonseparable preferences display greater response instability over time than people with separable preferences, controlling for political information and issue importance.

Why Don't States Switch Sides Anymore? The Rise and Fall of American Electoral Volatility (with Zachary Markovich). Abstract: American electoral volatility is in free fall. Overtime variation in the partisan balance of presidential elections across states is at an historic low and a fraction of its 1970's peak. The current decline in volatility parallels declines during the Gilded Age and Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. State electoral volatility also varies beyond the red state -- blue state divide. We hypothesize that volatility increases with voter uncertainty. Party polarization makes the parties' positions distinct, reducing voter uncertainty and volatility. Strong third-party candidates increase voter uncertainty and volatility. Close elections increase incentives for voters to become informed and for campaigns to inform voters, which reduce voter uncertainty. Higher voter turnout and a larger number of votes cast per state decrease volatility. The model is empirically validated using historical aggregate data from 1828 to 2016 and American National Election Studies data from 1960 to 2016.

Are Racial Identities Endogenous? Race Change and Vote Switching in the 2012-2016 US Presidential Elections (with Alexander Agadjanian) Abstract: Although racial identity is usually assumed to be unchanging, recent research shows otherwise. The role of politics in racial identification change has received little attention. Using panel data with waves around the last two presidential elections, this paper reveals survey evidence of race change and its strong relationship with vote switching patterns. Across several models and robust to various controls, switching from a non-Republican vote in 2012 to a 2016 Republican vote (i.e., non-Romney to Trump) significantly predicts nonwhite to white race change. Among nonwhites who did not vote Republican in 2012, switching to a Republican vote in 2016 increases the probability of adopting a white racial identity from a 0.03 baseline to 0.38 (962\% increase). The systematic relationship arguably does not suffer from measurement error, fails to appear for the 2008-2012 election period, and makes theoretical sense in light of 2016 campaign rhetoric and trends in political-social identity alignment.

Does Answering Survey Questions Change How People Think About Political Issues?  A Test of Whether Political Attitudes Are Pre-Existing or Constructed. Abstract: Does answering survey questions change a person’s set of available considerations about an issue?  A unique double-blind randomized survey experiment provides an answer to this question.  At the beginning of a sample survey, respondents answered an open-ended question asking them to list the issues that came to mind when thinking about one of eight randomly assigned issues.  Respondents answered the same question at the end of the survey, but for a different issue from the set.  Between the open-ended questions, respondents answered closed-ended questions about thirteen political issues, including some questions that explicitly linked issues.  Responses to the open-ended question at the beginning of the survey are no different from responses at the end of the survey. The results cast doubt on theories that political attitudes are constructed at the time of a survey and support theories that political attitudes exist prior to the survey.

Recent Publications:

Lacy, Dean, Emerson M. S. Niou, Philip Paolino, and Robert A. Rein. 2019. Measuring Preferences for Divided Government: Some Americans Want Divided Government and Vote to Create It.  Political Behavior. First on-line 22 December 2017. Abstract: Tests of theories of the electoral origins of divided government hinge on the proper measurement of voter preferences for divided government. Deriving preferences for divided government from voters’ ideological positions or responses to the standard American National Election Studies question inflates estimates of the proportion of people who prefer divided government. We present two alternative survey measures of preferences for divided government and evaluate the measures across multiple surveys. We find that the percentage of voters who prefer divided government is smaller than previous studies suggest. Voters who prefer divided government according to the new measures are significantly more likely than other voters to vote in ways that create divided government in both presidential year and midterm congressional elections.

Lacy, Dean, and Dino P. Christenson. 2017. Who Votes for the Future? Information, Expectations, and Endogeneity in Economic Voting. Political Behavior. 39(2):347-75. First on-line 09 August 2016.  Abstract: Voters’ four primary evaluations of the economy—retrospective national, retrospective pocketbook, prospective national, and prospective pocketbook—vary in the cognitive steps necessary to link economic outcomes to candidates in elections. We hypothesize that the effects of the different economic evaluations on vote choice vary with a voter’s ability to acquire information and anticipate the election outcome. Using data from the 1980 through 2004 US presidential elections, we estimate a model of vote choice that includes all four economic evaluations as well as information and uncertainty moderators. The effects of retrospective evaluations on vote choice do not vary by voter information. Prospective economic evaluations weigh in the decisions of the most informed voters, who rely on prospective national evaluations when they believe the incumbent party will win and on prospective pocketbook evaluations when they are uncertain about the election outcome or believe that the challenger will win. Voters who have accurate expectations about who will win the election show the strongest relationship between their vote choice and sociotropic evaluations of the economy, both retrospective and prospective. Voters whose economic evaluations are most likely to be endogenous to vote choice show a weaker relationship between economic evaluations and their votes than the voters who appear to be more objective in their assessments of the election. Economic voting is broader and more prospective than previously accepted, and concerns about endogeneity in economic evaluations are overstated.

Lacy, Dean. 2014. Moochers and Makers in the Voting Booth:  Who Benefits from Federal Spending, and How Did They Vote in the 2012 Presidential Election? Public Opinion Quarterly 78(S1):255-275. Abstract: The 2012 election campaign popularized the notion that people who benefit from federal spending vote for Democrats, while people who pay the preponderance of taxes vote Republican. A survey conducted during the election included questions to test this hypothesis and to assess the accuracy of voters’ perceptions of federal spending. Voters’ perceptions of their benefit from federal spending are determined by family income, age, employment status, and number of children, as well as by party identification and race. Voters aged 65 and older who believe they are net beneficiaries of federal spending are more likely to be Democrats and vote for Barack Obama than seniors who believe they are net contributors to the federal government. However, the 77.5 percent of voters under age 65 who believe they are net beneficiaries of federal spending are as likely to vote for Romney as for Obama and as likely to be Republicans as Democrats. Voters who live in states that receive more in federal funds than they pay in federal taxes are less likely to vote for Obama or to be Democrats. For most of the electorate, dependence on federal spending is unrelated to vote choice.

Lacy, Dean, and Emerson M.S. Niou. 2013. Nonseparable Preferences and Issue Packaging in Elections.  In Schofield, Norman, Gonzalo Caballero, and Daniel Kselman, eds., Advances in Political Economy:  Institutions, Modeling, and Empirical Analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Abstract:  In this chapter we develop a model in which candidates have fixed positions on a single issue dimension on which one candidate has an advantage by being closer to the median voter. The disadvantaged candidate can introduce a new issue to win the election. When all voters have separable preferences and the advantaged candidate moves last on the new issue, there is no way for the disadvantaged candidate to win. When some voters have nonseparable preferences over the issues, the disadvantaged can take a position that the advantaged candidate cannot beat. Candidates in an election can benefit from introducing new issues, but only when some voters have nonseparable preferences. Using data from a 2004 survey, we show that a substantial percentage of US voters have nonseparable preferences for many issues of public policy, creating incentives and opportunities for political candidates to package issues.

Lacy, Dean, and Emerson, M.S. Niou. 2012.  Information and Heterogeneity in Issue Voting:  Evidence from the 2008 Presidential Election in Taiwan.  Journal of East Asian Studies 12(1):119-141. Abstract: A voter’s capacity to acquire and retain information moderates the relationship between issues and the vote. Issues differ in their distance from the voter’s personal experience. Proximate issues, such as personal economic conditions, affect the vote decisions of highly informed and less informed voters equally. Distant issues, such as national economic conditions and foreign affairs, affect the vote of highly informed voters but not less informed voters. The 2008 presidential election on Taiwan provides a critical test of the effect of information on issue voting. Unification with mainland China versus Taiwan independence is the most important issue in the 2008 election, and voters with higher levels of political information show a larger effect of the issue on their vote. The national economy is also a significant predictor of vote choice, but only for highly informed voters. Personal economic conditions and other proximate issues are not significant predictors of the vote at any information level.

Norris, Catherine J., Amanda G Dumville, Lacy, Dean P. 2011. Affective Forecasting Errors in the 2008 Election: Underpredicting HappinessPolitical Psychology 32(2):235-49. Abstract: Individuals tend to be very bad at predicting their emotional responses to future events, often overestimating both the intensity and duration of their responses, particularly to negative events. The authors studied affective forecasting errors in the 2008 election in a large sample of undergraduates at Dartmouth College. Replicating past research, McCain supporters overpredicted their negative affect in response to the (future) election of Barack Obama. Obama supporters, however, underpredicted their happiness in response to his victory. Results are discussed with reference to mechanisms proposed to underlie the impact bias, as well as the unique circumstances surrounding this historic election season.

Lacy, Dean and Paolino, Philip. 2010. Testing Proximity Versus Directional Voting Using ExperimentsElectoral Studies 29:460-71. Abstract: A long-running debate about how voters use issues to evaluate candidates pits the proximity theory of voting against directional theory. Using surveys, both sides of the debate have found support for their preferred theory, but disagreement remains because of differing ways of analyzing the data. Lewis and King (2000) point out that these researchers make assumptions that bias results in favor of their theory. To avoid these difficulties, our approach creates fictitious candidates with controlled positions, presents these candidates to randomly-assigned subjects, and examines the relationship between subjects’ evaluations of these candidates and their ideological beliefs as a neutral test of proximity and directional theory. Our results provide reasonably strong support for proximity theory but little for directional theory.