Electoral rules can affect who wins and who loses elections. Most cities select office holders through plurality rule, but an alternative, ranked-choice voting (RCV), has become increasingly popular. RCV requires voters to rank candidates, instead of simply selecting their most preferred candidate. Observers debate whether RCV will cure a variety of electoral ills or undermine representation. We test the effect of RCV on voter’s choices and perceptions of representation using survey experiments with large, representative samples of respondents. We find that candidates of color are significantly penalized in both plurality and RCV elections, with no significant difference between the rule types. However, providing respondents with candidates’ partisan affiliation significantly increases support for candidates of color.

Using an app for smartphones, we run an experiment among high-school students to study the pattern of aggregation of sparsely distributed information. Agents are randomly arranged in small networks and can share only non-verifiable pieces of information. Results show that while information exchange is high, the level and the distribution of centralities among network members are important to shape the overall level of information aggregation. A reduction in the asymmetry among agents’ network centralities is associated with an improvement in the performance of the group in terms of aggregation of information.

Despite admonitions to address attrition in experiments – missingness on Y – alongside best practices designed to encourage transparency, most political science researchers all but ignore it. A quantitative literature search of this journal – where we would expect to find the most conscientious reporting of attrition – shows low rates of discussion of the issue. We suspect that there is confusion on the link between when attrition occurs and the type of validity it threatens when present, and limited connection to and guidance on which estimands are threatened by different attrition patterns. This is all exacerbated by limited tools to identify, investigate, and report patterns attrition. We offer the R package – attritevis – to visualize attrition over time, by intervention, and include a step-by-step guide to identifying and addressing attrition that balances post hoc analytical tools with guidance for revising designs to ameliorate problematic attrition.

Social scientists use list experiments in surveys to estimate the prevalence of sensitive attitudes and behaviors in a population of interest. However, the cumulative evidence suggests that the list experiment estimator is underpowered to capture the extent of sensitivity bias in common applications. The literature suggests double list experiments (DLEs) as an alternative to improve along the bias-variance frontier. This variant of the research design brings the additional burden of justifying the list experiment identification assumptions in both lists, which raises concerns over the validity of DLE estimates. To overcome this difficulty, this paper outlines two statistical tests to detect strategic misreporting that follows from violations to the identification assumptions. I illustrate their implementation with data from a study on support toward anti-immigration organizations in California and explore their properties via simulation.

I apply a new theoretical framework to voting to more cohesively bridge the economic cost-benefit model of voting with the psychology-motivated voting-as-a-habit literature. This new theoretical frame gives greater clarity as to how a vote in one election might beget a vote in another election, while yielding testable predictions as to which circumstances are more favorable for developing turnout persistence. To test these predictions, I make use of a novel dataset consisting of nine large-N, door-to-door voter mobilization field experiments in various election contexts (with ∼1.8 million voters in total). Consistent with prior empirical research, my analysis finds that being nudged to vote in one election leads to increased turnout four years later. But the main contribution of this paper is that the theoretical framework’s predictions and the corresponding empirical results make sense of turnout persistence heterogeneities that have been detected in certain prior empirical studies but not others.

We elicit social networks among students in an Italian high school either by measuring the complete network in an incentive-compatible way or by using a truncated elicitation of at most five links. We find that truncation undercounts weak links by up to 90% but only moderately undercounts the time spent with strong friends. We use simulations to demonstrate that the measurement error induced by censoring might be particularly significant when studying phenomena such as social learning which are often thought to operate along weak ties. We then discuss how a modified network elicitation protocol might be able to reduce measurement error.

In legislative bargaining, the proposer is often able to extract a greater proportion of the surplus. However, a higher likelihood of being selected as the proposer can backfire, as it may reduce the probability that the agent is included in a winning coalition. We experimentally test the theoretical prediction of potentially negative returns to recognition probability in two-period legislative bargaining noted in Baron and Ferejohn (1989). We find that higher recognition probability benefits subjects in all treatments, except one in which we automate the second period. It is because proposers often favor the member with the greater recognition probability as a coalition partner, and such tendency varies depending on the proposer’s recognition probability, counter to the theoretical prediction. In all treatments, a vast majority of subjects exhibit a strict preference for higher recognition probability.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether public discussion before a majority vote increases the saliency of minority interests and results in more egalitarian outcomes or whether voters use discussion to form majorities that benefit at the expense of minorities. When there are two alternatives, we find that public discussion increases the likelihood that individuals vote for equal allocations, but has little to no impact on the group outcomes. When participants choose among one equal and several unequal options, the multitude of unequal options creates a coordination problem, and we find that discussion decreases the frequency of egalitarian decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of public communication on the fairness of majority voting outcomes depends on the strategic environment.