Voting the Agenda

Candidates, Elections, and Ballot Propositions

Stephen P. Nicholson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691223841
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do voters make decisions in low-information elections? How distinctive are these voting decisions? Traditional approaches to the study of voting and elections often fail to address these questions by ignoring other elections taking place simultaneously. In this groundbreaking book, Stephen Nicholson shows how issue agendas shaped by state ballot propositions prime voting decisions for presidential, gubernatorial, Senate, House, and state legislative races.
As a readily accessible source of information, the issues raised by ballot propositions may have a spillover effect on elections and ultimately define the meaning of myriad contests. Nicholson examines issues that appear on the ballot alongside candidates in the form of direct legislation. Found in all fifty states, but most abundant in those states that feature citizen-initiated ballot propositions, direct legislation represents a large and growing source of agenda issues.
Looking at direct legislation issues such as abortion, taxes, environmental regulation, the nuclear freeze, illegal immigration, and affirmative action, Nicholson finds that these topics shaped voters' choices of candidates even if the issues were not featured in a particular contest or were not relevant to the job responsibilities of a particular office.
He concludes that the agendas established by ballot propositions have a far greater effect in priming voters than is commonly recognized, and indeed, that the strategic use of initiatives and referenda by political elites potentially thwarts the will of the people.

Chapter 1

KINDRED VOTES: AN INTRODUCTION

Pete Wilson was in trouble. With California smarting from an economic recession, the Republican governor’s reelection prospects looked dim. More than a year before his 1994 reelection bid, Wilson had the lowest approval rating of any California governor in the history of the California Field Poll and trailed his likely Democratic opponent, Kathleen Brown, by more than twenty percentage points. Although a relative newcomer to California politics, Brown had some impressive qualities. She was the state’s treasurer, an adroit fund-raiser, and well-known among voters. In short, many believed Wilson’s defeat a foregone conclusion.

Wilson wasn’t the only one in trouble. Michael Huffington, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, was also a long-shot candidate that year but for different reasons. In contrast to Wilson,Huffington was unknown to most California voters. He had thin political credentials limited to a single term in the House and few legislative accomplishments. On the other hand, Huffington’s opponent, Diane Feinstein, was a popular, well-recognized figure in California politics. Few pundits thought Feinstein would have any trouble defeating Huffington for the seat that she had easily won just two years prior (in a special election). Indeed, a little more than a year before the election, the California Field Poll showed Huffington trailing Feinstein by twenty-seven percentage points.

In an ending that few anticipated, both Republican candidates surpassed expectations. Wilson defeated Brown by a fourteen-point margin and Huffington, although falling short of defeating Feinstein, lost by a two-point margin. What helped these long-shot Republicans? In a word, the "agenda." In California’s 1994 elections, the agenda included hot-button ballot initiatives, most notably Proposition 187, an initiative that sought to deny illegal immigrants public benefits. The initiative was the topic of extensive political debate in the media as well as in the candidate races, resulting in a majority of voters naming it the most important political event of the elections, including the Senate and governor’s contests (Lubenow 1995, 124). Support for Proposition 187 was also high; roughly three out of five voters favored it throughout the campaign season. Since the parties had taken clear positions on the initiative—Republicans were for it and Democrats against it—Proposition 187 cast the election in terms favorable to Republican candidates. Thus, illegal immigration helped define the meaning of the election, boosting the electoral fortunes of Republican candidates, especially Wilson,who had made it the cornerstone of his campaign.

The story of Pete Wilson, Michael Huffington, and Proposition 187 is dramatic but not unique insofar as it illustrates how direct legislation may define the agenda. Although the frequency of direct legislation use varies across the states, in the 2002 elections, voters in forty states cast their ballots on 202 statewide ballot measures (Waters 2003, 8).¹ The last twenty years have seen the heaviest use of initiatives (Waters 2003, 8), the types of direct legislation most often associated with politically charged issues. In the last few election cycles, for example, controversial issues such as affirmative action, animal rights, abortion, medicinal marijuana, school choice, gun control, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted suicide, taxes, health care reform, environmental reform, and bilingual education were the topics of ballot initiatives. Issues of this kind, the focus of my research, play an important role in shaping the agenda and thus the types of considerations voters make in judging candidates.

Despite the fact that ballot measures take place alongside candidate races, scholars seldom consider them together. The omission is curious given the aforementioned increase in the frequency of initiative and referendum use over the last twenty years, especially in light of how many ballot measures contain controversial issues, strong ideological overtones, and/or expensive campaigns. Of course, I do not expect all ballot measures to play an important role in candidate races since not all of them have strong partisan or ideological overtones. Nevertheless, a good number do fit this description; many interest groups involved in the initiative process turn to ballot measures precisely because legislators are unwilling to handle many controversial issues.

The study of agendas, of course, is broader than the role of direct legislation in candidate races. Although I focus on a single phenomenon, my goal is to illuminate the role of agendas in elections. The conclusions of this book, therefore, should be applicable to not only how ballot measures affect voting in candidate races but also how issues from one candidate race spill over into another. They should also speak to how issue ad campaigns waged by interest groups and political parties affect voting behavior (Magleby 2002).

I define agenda as the one or more policy issues that matter to voters in a given electoral environment. While actors raise multiple issues within a given electoral environment, typically only a few achieve agenda status. Thus, even though a good number of issues might be well-known, the agenda consists of the most salient issues. My principal argument is that agendas play a profound role in U.S. elections by establishing the criteria voters use in making candidate judgments. Agendas introduce common elements into voters’ candidate judgments, and not just for a single office. Thus, agendas structure voting decisions along a common evaluative dimension and do so for offices that are as seemingly different from each other as U.S. Senate,House, and governor. By highlighting decision making at the constituency level, agendas also emphasize the diversity of issues that structure voting decisions across the United States. Taken together, I hope to elucidate how agendas unify voting decisions within a constituency and alter the foundations of candidate evaluation across constituencies.

It is curious that political scientists seldom consider voting for candidates in nonpresidential contests from the perspective of agendas. Instead, voting behavior research typically stresses the uniqueness of voting decisions by distinguishing voting decisions by office or issue on the ballot. The underdog candidates from the beginning of the chapter illustrate the shortcomings of isolating voting decisions. Not recognizing how voting decisions belong to the same family, conventional approaches would consider these contests apart, grouping the Wilson versus Brown race with other gubernatorial contests and the Huffington versus Feinstein race with other Senate contests. In so doing, analysts would likely stress the role of state issues, especially the state economy, in the gubernatorial races (e.g., Chubb 1988; Stein 1990) and national issues in the senatorial contests (e.g., Abramowitz and Segal 1992; Hibbing and Alford 1982). To be sure, these issues play an important role in voting for both types of offices and may even have the greatest overall effect. However, Wilson likely owed much of his reelection to the illegal immigration issue, and although Huffington lost by a slim margin, had illegal immigration not been on the ballot he probably would have lost by a larger margin.

Traditional approaches, therefore, exaggerate the individuality and disconnectedness of voting decisions across issues and candidates on the ballot. Consequently, scholars seldom consider whether direct legislation affects voting in candidate races or the broader question of spillover effects in which “outside” issues influence the criteria voters use to judge candidates. Although political scientists have learned much about elections and voting behavior from the methodological choice of studying elections in isolation from each other, it has privileged some explanatory variables at the expense of others. By using analytical frameworks that stress the distinctiveness of electoral choices, scholars lose sight of how voting decisions—up and down the ballot—belong to a single family by sharing a common understanding of politics centered on the information environment. To be clear, I am not arguing that scholars abandon the study of elections by office type. Rather, I am arguing that voting decisions across offices are not as unique as traditional approaches suggest. In the remainder of this chapter, I critically evaluate conventional approaches and how they elevate considerations that differentiate types of elections while obscuring the electoral information environment, especially the vital role of agendas.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF METHODOLOGICAL CHOICE

Why study elections apart from each other? Why look at certain types of electoral information and disregard others? More specifically, why ignore issues that share space with candidates on the same ballot? To answer these questions, I begin with the simple insight that elections are busy and confusing marketplaces. In each election, candidates running for different offices try to flood the electorate with campaign messages. Candidates running for president, governor, Congress, and state assembly, to name a few, compete for scarce voter attention not only with their opponents in a given race but also with candidates running for different offices and not all that infrequently the campaigns for and against ballot measures. The electoral process thus generates a cacophony of messages sent by many actors—candidates, mass media, political parties, and interest groups— with the intention of reaching and persuading voters.

To make sense of voting decisions for candidates amid this chaos, analysts isolate different types of elections by office. Studies of electoral behavior treat each office, often implicitly, as self-contained and exempt from external influences.² In much political science research, critics often direct their energies toward models that leave political processes “inside” the box unexamined, labeling such neglect as “black box” approaches. I take the opposite tack by arguing that students of elections often neglect to look “outside” the box at the broader information environment.

Studying elections and voting decisions by office type is typically done for the sake of unit homogeneity, which requires that cases be identical, or nearly so, for the sake of making causal inferences. The unstated assumption is that the act of voting is largely not comparable across different types of offices, so that organizing the study of voting behavior by office is necessary for comparability. But observe the implication of this assumption: the act of voting varies considerably across elected offices.³ From this vantage point, it is not surprising that voting behavior research orbits around difference rather than similarity.

The notion of unit homogeneity does not require units to be identical, however, but simply that they be comparable. As King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) note, it is never possible to achieve strict unit comparability because units of analysis always differ in some respect. Instead, “two units are homogenous when the expected values of the dependent variables from each unit are the same when our explanatory variable takes on a particular value” (91). Thus, the comparison of voting decisions across different elected offices simply requires that independent variables have a comparable effect on the dependent variable.

Studies of voting behavior provide considerable evidence that independent variables do have common effects across different offices. Few students of voting behavior, for example, dispute that partisan identification is the most important explanatory variable when looking at individual voting behavior across a variety of offices, especially low-information elections. Furthermore, few would disagree that variations in the effects of partisan identification are likely specific to the vagaries of electoral contests rather than the process of voting. Voters in low-information contests rely heavily on partisan cues (Schaffner and Streb 2002) while voters in information-rich contests will be somewhat less reliant on partisan cues given the abundance of other data. The insight here is that the mix of ingredients is the same; what differs is the amount. Gronke (2000) makes much the same point with reference to House and Senate elections when he argues that the “inputs” of voting for these offices are the same—the difference lies in the amount of a given input.

Nevertheless, many studies of voting behavior emphasize how institutional responsibilities (the job requirements of an elected office) and campaign-specific issues (information from a particular race) vary the foundations of candidate evaluation for different offices. If voters draw on institutional responsibilities, they compare the candidates’ records against a set of criteria based on the responsibilities associated with a particular office. For example, the local orientation of the House of Representatives directs voters to evaluate House candidates by their ability to handle casework and bring federal projects to the district. The implication of this tendency is that voters use different criteria for evaluating candidates running for different offices.

On the other hand, if voters use campaign-specific issues as evaluative criteria, they focus on policy issues from a given contest.⁴ According to this approach, voters evaluate candidates in a given race based on the issues the candidates discuss in their campaigns or the issues most prevalent in media coverage of their contests. The implication of this approach is that voters only consider campaign issues (policy issues) relevant to a particular contest and screen out campaign messages from other contests. The picture that emerges from these approaches is one of voters pondering very different criteria as they move down the ballot, considering candidates for governor, senator, or representative. Although many scholars would balk at the notion that voters use subtle distinctions in making candidate judgments, the methodological choice of studying electoral behavior from the vantage point of the office or the flow of campaign information about a particular race nevertheless imposes this type of fine-tuning into the study of the voting decision.

Below, I address a seldom recognized but nonetheless real puzzle in voting research: If most voters pay little or no attention to politics, why do we assume that they correctly link numerous campaign messages with the appropriate candidates or assign certain institutional responsibilities to particular offices and vote accordingly? I argue that, in large part, voters do not make these distinctions and instead rely on the most salient morsels of information available. Often this information takes the form of partisan or incumbency cues, but it might also include prominent policy issues located within electoral environments such as states.

The Methodological Choice of Institutional Responsibilities

As mentioned, the institutional responsibilities approach implies that each office has its duties and requirements, and voters fine-tune their vote choices based on the particular demands of various political offices. Given this logic, the national orientation of the Senate requires voters to evaluate Senate candidates based on national issues such as the economy or presidential approval. Similarly, the Senate’s reputation for handling international affairs requires voters to evaluate Senate candidates based on foreign policy. In contrast, because House members have a local orientation, pork barrel politics and constituency service play a large role in voters’ decisions. Finally, because voters presumably understand the fine distinctions between federal and state offices, gubernatorial elections should turn on statewide considerations rather than national influences. These perceptions largely guide analysts in deciding what information matters in these races.

But scholars have found little evidence that citizens make meaningful institutional distinctions between voting for House and Senate candidates (Gronke 2000; Krasno 1994). Gronke (2000, chap. 6) found that voter evaluations of the job requirements of House members and senators do not turn on institutional distinctions. Instead of differentiating House members from senators by job requirements, voters ascribe the same duties to both offices, thus debunking the notion that national issues play a greater role in evaluations of senators and local issues play a greater role in evaluations of House members. Similarly, Stein and Bickers (1994) debunk the notion that House incumbents’ reelection prospects are intimately tied to their ability to bring home pork barrel projects, a responsibility political scientists strongly associate with House members’ institutional roles. Although this may be true for a small segment of voters, the authors find that “[m]ost members of the general public remain indifferent to alterations in the flow of new [pork barrel] rewards” (394). Thus, in many studies, the traditional wisdom that the institutional roles and responsibilities of elected officials shape mass political behavior often is not supported empirically.

Further, citizens’ disregard of institutional distinctions between House and Senate extends beyond the electoral arena. For some time, scholars generally believed that House and Senate members have different representational roles because of the institutional differences between the two chambers, and that citizens appreciated the distinction.⁵ Scholars typically assumed that House members, given their role as the institution “where the people speak,” have closer representational relationships with their constituents than do senators. Questioning this wisdom, Oppenheimer (1996) found that the distinction between House and Senate (the institutional setting) is much less important to constituent-representative relationships than state population size. Indeed, he found that senators from small population states have closer relationships with constituents than do House members.

Some scholars explicitly argue that voters use institutional criteria by differently evaluating senatorial and gubernatorial candidates according to federal-state responsibilities (Atkeson and Partin 1995, 1998; Stein 1990). According to Atkeson and Partin (1995, 1998), voters evaluate candidates running for Senate on national political concerns such as the economy and presidential approval while they evaluate candidates running for governor on matters such as the state economy.

On its face, the case for voters making state versus federal distinctions appears stronger than that for distinctions between the House and Senate. Indeed, the institutional distinction between the House and Senate, both federal offices, appears smaller as compared to that separating the federal and state governments. Yet even here the evidence is mixed. For example, although Stein (1990) and Carsey and Wright (1998) find that state economic conditions affect gubernatorial voting, they also find that national conditions play an important role. Moreover, some scholars have found that national conditions are the primary force behind gubernatorial elections and that state-specific factors play a secondary role (Chubb 1988; Kenney 1983; Peltzman 1987).

The case for voters making institutional distinctions is especially unconvincing examined in light of citizens’ lack of political knowledge. The amount of political knowledge, not to mention willingness, required for voters to use institutional distinctions as criteria in vot...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List Of Figure
• List Of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Kindred Votes: An Introduction
• Chapter 2: A Theory of Agenda Voting
• Chapter 3: Studying Agendas and Direct Legislation in U.S. Elections
• Chapter 4: Ballot Measures and Congressional Election Agendas
• Chapter 5: Priming the Freeze: Nuclear Freeze Ballot Measures as a Common Basis of Candidate Voting in State and Federal Elections
• Chapter 6: Taking the Initiative: Illegal Immigrants, Affirmative Action, and Strategic Politicians in California’s 1994 and 1996 Elections
• Chapter 7: Direct Democracy: The People’s Agenda?
• Notes
• References
• Index