Political Context and Citizen Response in the 2010 Elections

投票和选举研究中的一个核心问题是，选民在选举中如何应对竞争对手之间的差异。大规模选民研究的一个长期存在的问题是，他们依赖调查受访者对竞争候选人的问题立场和非政策特征的看法和报告来解释他们的投票选择、候选人评价和相关概念。这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令人怀疑，大多数学者甚至没有试图估计候选人政策差异对非总统选举投票选择的影响。这篇文献中的许多研究得出了悲观的结论，认为公民有能力达到古典民主理论中的基本期望。该项目在美国众议院选区的全国随机抽样中聘请地区专家，就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进行报告。专家评级可以评估候选人差异对公民反应的影响，而不受调查受访者的感知偏差的影响，也不需要假设选民必须知道并能够报告候选人的差异，以便这些差异影响他们的投票选择。在当代选举中，使用地区专家来评估候选人的特征导致对公民的积极看法，而不是基于调查的研究，后者依赖于受访者对候选人竞争选票的看法和报告。该项目将通过为候选人差异如何影响公民在选举中的行为等基本问题提供一种新的方法，从而增加对美国民主理论和实践的理解。通过将候选人差异和政治背景的其他方面的专家评级与来自全国调查的选民数据相结合，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。

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.