Political Context and Citizen Response in the 2010 Elections

2010 年选举中的政治背景和公民反应

• 批准号: 0852387
• 负责人: Walter Stone
• 金额: $ 25.59万
• 依托单位: University of California-Davis
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-04-01 至 2014-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0852387&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Political; Context; Citizen; Response; 2010

A central question in the study of voting and elections is how voters respond to differences between competing candidates in an election. A persistent problem in large-scale studies of the electorate is that they depend on survey respondents' perceptions and reports of the issue positions and non-policy characteristics of competing candidates to explain their voting choice, candidate evaluations, and related concepts. Such reports are strongly influenced by partisan predispositions and biases, and many respondents lack the information to report on candidate policy positions or characteristics. As a result, analyses of how candidate differences affect respondents' behavior are suspect, and most scholars do not even attempt to estimate the impact of candidate policy differences on voting choice in non-presidential elections. Many studies in this literature reach pessimistic conclusions about the capacity of citizens to measure up to fundamental expectations in classical democratic theory. This project employs district experts in a national random sample of U.S. House districts to report on the policy positions, electoral prospects, and non-policy characteristics of congressional candidates in the 2010 elections. Expert ratings allow for an assessment of the impact of candidate differences on citizen response, independent of perceptual biases of survey respondents, and without assuming that voters must be aware of and able to report candidate differences in order for those differences to affect their voting choice. The use of district experts to assess candidate characteristics leads to a much more positive view of the citizen in contemporary elections than is true of survey-based studies that rely on respondents' perceptions and reports about the candidates competing for their votes. The project will increase understanding of the theory and practice of American democracy by providing a new approach to fundamental questions about how candidate differences affect citizen behavior in elections. By integrating expert ratings of candidate differences and other aspects of the political context with data on voters from national surveys and making this data widely available to the scholarly community, this project will direct scholarly attention to the importance of context in explaining citizen behavior.

投票和选举研究的一个核心问题是选民如何应对选举中竞争候选人之间的差异。 大规模选民研究中一个长期存在的问题是，它们依赖于调查受访者对问题立场的看法和报告以及竞争候选人的非政策特征来解释他们的投票选择、候选人评估和相关概念。 此类报告受到党派倾向和偏见的强烈影响，许多受访者缺乏报告候选人政策立场或特征的信息。 因此，关于候选人差异如何影响受访者行为的分析是值得怀疑的，大多数学者甚至没有尝试估计候选人政策差异对非总统选举中投票选择的影响。 该文献中的许多研究对于公民达到古典民主理论中的基本期望的能力得出了悲观的结论。 该项目聘请地区专家对美国众议院选区进行全国随机抽样，报告 2010 年选举中国会候选人的政策立场、选举前景和非政策特征。 专家评级允许评估候选人差异对公民反应的影响，独立于调查受访者的感知偏见，并且不假设选民必须意识到并能够报告候选人差异，以便这些差异影响他们的投票选择。 与基于调查的研究相比，利用地区专家来评估候选人特征可以使公民对当代选举产生更加积极的看法，而基于调查的研究依赖于受访者对竞选选票的候选人的看法和报告。 该项目将通过提供一种新方法来解决有关候选人差异如何影响公民在选举中行为的基本问题，从而增进对美国民主理论和实践的理解。 通过将专家对候选人差异和政治背景其他方面的评级与全国调查中的选民数据相结合，并将这些数据广泛提供给学术界，该项目将引导学术界关注背景在解释公民行为方面的重要性。