Elizabeth Simas, Ph.D.
ensimas@uh.edu
University of Houston
Research Interests
Elections, Election Administration, and Voting Behavior
Experimental Research
Gender and Politics
Public Opinion
Countries of Interest
United States
Publications:
Journal Articles:
While it is widely accepted that in the United States, political party labels serve as brand names which cue voters about the beliefs and ideologies of members, I explore the possibility that the signals sent by these labels are contingent upon the party membership of the individual voter. More specifically, I draw on social identity theory and hypothesize that individuals will be more likely to perceive heterogeneity among members of their own party. I find support for this hypothesis in perceptions of both the overall ideologies and voting records of US senators. Additionally, I compare respondent perceptions back to actual voting records and find that inpartisans are (1) only more likely to be correct when senators do in fact vote differently and (2) significantly less likely to be correct when senators vote the same way. These results suggest that the partisan differences uncovered are due to psychological bias and not just informational asymmetries and that biases stemming from group membership may lead to distorted opinions of senators and the representation they provide.
A common thread running through the research on the 7-point ideological scale frequently used on U.S. surveys is that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are abstract and subject to interpretation. I contribute to this literature by using anchoring vignettes to clearly link these differences to partisanship. I show that Democratic and Republican respondents interpret and use the response categories of the ideological scale in systematically different ways such that Democrats have significantly lower thresholds for the distinctions between categories. These results not only have implications for the studies of ideology and polarization in the United States but also demonstrate the usefulness of anchoring vignettes when comparing individuals not just across countries but within them as well.
The 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included fierce dialogue about women and issues typically connected to them. The inflammatory comments that conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh made about female law student Sandra Fluke and the Affordable Health Care Act's (ACA) requirements that all workplaces cover contraceptives were central topics in the news. The controversy literally followed Romney in the form of “Pillamina,” a human-sized costume designed to look like a pack of birth control pills that shadowed the candidate's summer swing state tour. While “Pillamina” was the work of Planned Parenthood's Action Fund, the Obama campaign also took aim at Romney on this issue, running a television commercial featuring “Dawn and Alex,” two women talking about how out of touch Romney is with women's health issues. The Romney campaign's attempts to counter these attacks and shift the focus of conversation were largely thwarted, as questionable comments from Republican Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock brought the issue of abortion to the forefront. Both of these statements added fuel to the narrative that Republicans are out of touch with women's needs. And Romney himself contributed to the problem, as his notorious “binders full of women” debate response broadened the scope of the issue from reproductive rights to more general issues about gender equality. Altogether, these Republican comments and positions opened the door for Democrats on the campaign trail to attack the party, and a popular conclusion is that this “War on Women” narrative hurt the Republican Party and played an integral part in Obama's victory.
The general consensus of the research on US primary contests is that voters consider candidates’ potential for a general election victory when choosing their party’s nominee. Yet, at the individual level, this literature has failed to (1) clearly isolate the effects of electability from the money and media attention that they generate; and (2) properly control for the potential effects of ideology. Using an original experimental design, I find that electability can increase the likelihood of a voter supporting a more ideologically distant candidate. I also show that when faced with a tradeoff, a large percentage of subjects from both parties choose electability over ideology. The resulting implication is that there is potential for moderates to be successful in primaries, as even ideologically extreme voters appear to be willing to compromise on policy representation when confronted with a more distant but electable candidate.
The literature largely assumes that a candidate’s religious affiliation sends signals about his or her ideological leanings and policy preferences. We contend that prior works have not sufficiently accounted for the effects of the party label. Using an original experimental design that manipulates both religion and party, we show that the effects of a religious cue are more limited than previously implied. Though Evangelical and Catholic cues do impact impressions of a candidate’s stance on abortion, the partisan cue dominates perceptions of overall ideology. These findings further demonstrate the power of the party brand and are more consistent with research arguing for the non-policy value of the religion heuristic.
Ambiguity -- whereby candidates make deliberately unclear position statements on key issues -- has long been touted by pundits and political scientists as a smart campaign strategy. In this manuscript, two experiments suggest the usefulness of ambiguous rhetoric on salient issues is overstated. Voters rely on well-publicized partisan positions on political issues as heuristics, a factor that has often been overlooked by the existing literature. This means that an issue will inform a voter's decision even if the candidate speaks ambiguously on it. Further, while ambiguity does not change the voters' perceptions of the candidate's position relative to silence, it does raise the salience of the issue that candidate is attempting to minimize. Hence, for candidates who wish to hide unfavorable positions, silence is a better rhetorical strategy than ambiguity.
If candidates do not state clear issue positions, then voters cannot anticipate how the candidates will govern if elected nor hold candidates accountable for breaking campaign pledges. Yet, previous research argues electoral incentives lead candidates to avoid discussing the key issues of the day. Even though silence on issues is the modal campaign strategy, this paper argues that candidates systematically make clear issue statements on occasion. We identify three variables that predict whether a candidate will address an issue and the clarity of the candidate’s stance on that issue: (i) the public salience of an issue; (ii) ideological congruence between candidate and district; and (iii) candidate quality. This argument is tested using data on candidate position-taking regarding the Iraq War and gay marriage collected from the campaign websites of U.S. House candidates in 2006 and 2008.
Utilizing data that allows for the placement of both of the candidates running and voters on the same ideological scale, I model proximity voting in the 2010 House elections. I demonstrate that though the literature predominantly emphasizes partisanship and incumbency, relative distance from the candidates also plays a significant role in the voting decision. Additionally, I show that these proximity effects are conditional upon the type of candidate running and the individual's partisan attachment. In total, these results show that while the rates of partisan voting and incumbent victory are high in House elections, voters do consider ideological proximity and can punish candidates who take positions that are too far out of line.
The act of voting is much like a gamble: Voters can never be certain about where candidates stand or what they will actually do once in office. In this note, we argue that there is theoretically interesting heterogeneity in risk attitudes among the mass public—heterogeneity that has important electoral consequences. We hypothesize that risk-averse voters will be drawn to candidates who offer certainty and stability, whereas risk-accepting voters will be more willing to support candidates characterized by uncertainty and change. Utilizing data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel Study, we show that individual risk attitudes significantly influence support for challenger candidates in the 2008 U.S. House races. We then unpack this empirical relationship between risk attitudes and willingness to support challenger candidates using two additional data sets. These supplementary analyses suggest that the relationship between risk attitudes and willingness to support challengers may be partly attributable to the fact that challengers represent a departure from the status quo and typically have less governing experience. In short, challengers represent a gamble that the more risk accepting are more willing to take.
We add to the literature that examines the relationship between candidate valence and policy strategies by arguing that candidates intrinsically value both the policies and the personal character of the winning candidate. In making this argument, we distinguish between two dimensions of candidate valence: strategic valence refers to factors such as name recognition, fundraising ability, and campaigning skills, while character valence is composed of qualities that voters and candidates intrinsically value in office holders, including integrity, competence, and diligence. Our model considers challengers who value both the policies and the character-based valence of the incumbent and assumes that the incumbent’s policy position is fixed by prior commitments. Under these conditions, we show that challengers who are superior to the incumbent in their character-based valence have incentives to moderate their policy positions. We report empirical tests of this good-government result of our model, using data on the 2006 congressional elections.
If candidates sometimes seek to distinguish themselves from their parties and are ambiguous about their policy positions, to what extent do the policy platforms of parties affect individuals’ perceptions of presidential candidate positions? Using data from the American National Election Study and the Comparative Manifesto Project from 1972 to 2000, we show that citizens are able to use party platforms in their assessments of presidential candidates. We also demonstrate that an individual’s level of education is important in the process of linking Republican Party platforms to Republican presidential candidates. Our findings have important implications for the role of parties in presidential elections.
In this article, we examine the effect of citizens’ risk orientations on policy choices that are framed in various ways. We introduce an original risk orientations scale and test for the relationship between risk orientations and policy preferences using an original survey experiment. We find that individuals with higher levels of risk acceptance are more likely to prefer probabilistic outcomes as opposed to certain outcomes. Mortality and survival frames influence the choices citizens make, but so does our individual-difference measure of risk acceptance. Finally, using a unique within-subject design, we find that risk acceptance undercuts susceptibility to framing effects across successive framing scenarios. The findings suggest that citizens’ risk orientations are consequential in determining their policy views and their susceptibility to framing effects.
We examine the relationship between the valence qualities of candidates and the ideological positions they take in U.S. House elections based on a study of the 2006 midterm elections. Our design enables us to distinguish between campaign and character dimensions of candidate valence and to place candidates and districts on the same ideological scale. Incumbents with a personal‐character advantage are closer ideologically to their district preferences, while disadvantaged challengers take more extreme policy positions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, challengers can reap electoral rewards by taking more extreme positions relative to their districts. We explore a possible mechanism for this extremism effect by demonstrating that challengers closer to the extreme received greater financial contributions, which enhanced their chances of victory. Our results bear on theories of representation that include policy and valence, although the interactions between these two dimensions may be complex and counterintuitive.
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