EVIC (or at least a report we worked on) is in the news!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/opinion/increasing-voter-turnout-2018.html
AWARD NOTICE
Award Date: June 8, 2017
Award No. (FAIN): 1727461
Proposal No.: 1727461
Managing Division Abbreviation: SESThe National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant to Portland State University for support of the project described in the proposal referenced above as modified by revised budget dated June 2, 2017.
This project, entitled “Election Sciences Workshop,” is under the direction of Phil Keisling, in collaboration with the following proposals
Proposal No: PI Name/Institution
——————- ——————————————————————————————————-
1727458 Paul . Gronke, Reed College
I’ll let the OPB story speak for itself, since I was one of the co-authors of the report.
I posted this query on the Political Methdology listserv:
Hello all, I have some students in an election sciences class who want to do some visualizations using CCES data. I’d like them to use the survey weights if possible, but don’t know an easy way to do this in R.
I have come across this package that claims to support graphics and complex survey weights, but can’t find a reference or vignette that uses any graphics: http://r-survey.r-forge.r-project.org/survey/
Thanks!
Paul Gronke
Reed College
And have provided a review of the answers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VmVeVJ5kzj7OBhWRmH7VHOW4DxGBQ4KYNeTqDSTOaoE/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks to Jay Lee of Reed College for helping me assemble this.
Thanks to those participants in the Political Methodology listserv who responded to a query that I posted a month ago about how to produce survey “toplines” using either Stata or R. The attached document provides a detailed summary of the responses; I have posted the most useful reply here.
Original Question
From: Paul Gronke <gronkep@reed.edu>
Quick question for the list: Lisa Bryant (CU Fresno) and I are preparing some “top lines” and “tabs” for a client with whom we conducted a survey.
If you have seen these before, they are usually organized so that categorial survey responses are reported on the rows, and the columns report the overall responses, then responses “tabbed” or “crossed” by various demographic and political categories. Roll your eyes if you will that this is just a big set of exploratory cross tabs, but a lot of folks expect to see them to help digest the survey results.
A typical “tab” looks like this:
VARIABLE Total GOP IND DEM MEN WOMEN …
Category 1 N % N % N % N % N % N %
Category 2 N % …
TOP SOLUTION
Stata Special
From: Jonathan Mendelson
Hi Paul,
I posted a response to the list, but it hasn’t gone through yet, so I thought I’d reply directly. I encountered the same issue as you and wrote a Stata package that essentially creates “tabs” in spreadsheet form. You can install it in Stata via “ssc install tabsheet” or view information at https://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s458128.html; there are examples in the documentation so you should be able to get started fairly quickly.
The program is not particularly flexible, but it is easy to use, and some colleagues at my survey firm have found it very useful. Although it doesn’t currently output to anything other than tab-delimited file (which can be opened in a spreadsheet), with some clever formatting in Excel, you could print the resulting spreadsheet to PDF for something nicer looking.
If you need something more flexible in Stata, I’d recommend tabout, although that may require more work to set up. If you find out about any R packages that do something similar, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Best,
Jonathan
The complete list of responses, including various R and Stata solutions, is provided in this PDF: polmeth-question-survey-tabs
http://www.ssrc.org/about/employment/listings/anxieties-of-democracy-program-director/
Paper proposals are being invited for a Summer Conference on Election Science, Reform, and Administration, hosted by Reed College and Portland State University, and co-sponsored by the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College and the Election Data and Science Lab at MIT. The conference will be held in Portland, OR from July 27-28, 2017.
The goals of the conference are, first, to provide a forum for scholars in political science, public administration, law, computer science, statistics, and other fields who are working to develop rigorous empirical approaches to the study of how laws and administrative procedures affect the quality of elections in the United States; and, second, to build scientific capacity by identifying major questions in the field, fostering collaboration, and connecting senior and junior scholars.
The conference is designed to facilitate close attention to the papers presented, including extensive feedback and discussion. Therefore, papers should represent new work, with early drafts of papers encouraged.
We hope that a wide variety of topics will be addressed at the conference. We are particularly interested in new and innovative projects that address long standing questions about the impact of election reforms on registration and turnout at both the state and federal level; how the voter experience has improved or eroded during the two recent waves of election reform; and the research design and methodological challenges in election science. The following is a list provides a few sample ideas, but should not be considered exhaustive:
- How new or changed election laws affect the size and makeup of the pool of registered voters and the federal, state, and/or local electorates;
- Professionalization (or the lack thereof) and the quality of election administration;
- Evaluating the impact of voting centers, consolidated precincts, and convenience voting;
- How election reform has differentially impacted historically disadvantaged segments of the electorate;
- The analytical and methodological tools needed to work with voter registration and voter history files, and challenges in making causal inferences when working with these files;
- New methods for connecting other behavioral records (e.g. survey data) or geospatial data with voter history and voter turnout data
Airfare, lodging, and conference meals will be covered for paper presenters and discussants. Other scholars are welcome to attend if they can cover conference costs (details to be announced within a month).
Lonna Atkeson, University of New Mexico, and Bernard Fraga, Indiana University, will serve as program co-chairs, and Paul Gronke, Reed College and Phil Keisling, Center for Public Service at PSU, will act as conference organizers and hosts.
Paper proposals of no more than 250 words should be submitted by April 15, 2017. Submit proposals at http://bit.ly/PDXelection – we expect to announce decisions by May 1. Any questions can be sent to atkeson@umn.edu, bfraga@indiana.edu, or gronke@reed.edu.
Scholars wishing to attend without presenting a paper should also contact Emily Hebbron (hebbron@reed.edu) by May 1st. Further details about the conference will posted on the conference Web site soon thereafter.
Please feel free to re-distribute this announcement to relevant individuals and e-mail lists. We look forward to reading your paper proposals!
Yours sincerely,
Lonna Atkeson, Bernard Fraga, and Paul Gronke
The research team at the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have a new paper analyzing the partisan impact of early voting laws, in combination with a set of other election reforms. The abstract is provided below; the piece is gated at the Political Research Quarterly but may be available from the authors.
The piece is a follow up from the team’s widely cited 2014 piece (conveniently available because it is part of the North Carolina case)that shows that early voting may have a mixed effect on turnout, depending on the mix of other election reforms that are already in place.
I like what the authors have done here, and I don’t find it particularly surprising. I’ve never been convinced by the conventional political wisdom that early voting always helps Democrats. That just doesn’t comport with the longstanding findings that Republicans use no-excuse balloting at higher rates than Independents or Democrats. The reasons for this are complex, including what I suspect is a historical legacy of the emergence of direct mail mobilization by Richard Viguerie in the late 1970s, tied to higher rates of absentee voting among older, more conservative, more Republican voters, and Reagan’s roots in California politics.
This kind of suspicion led to some criticism of the 2014 piece because the team coded “early voting” as a single administrative procedure, not discriminating between no-excuse absentee and early in-person. They’ve fixed that here, and the results hold. A key table of results is reproduced below.
I would still caution against overinterpreting these results as providing a roadmap for election law gamesmanship. Burden et al. spend a bit too much time, in my judgment, opining about how partisan actors may or may not misestimate the political impact of reforms to election laws, without acknowledging the highly contingent and dynamic nature of the legal and administrative environment.
For example, it’s almost certain than when a new voting method is made available, strategic political actors from both parties look at these changes, look at what groups opt for one or another method, and start to change their campaigns accordingly. Capturing this kind of institutional dynamic is nearly impossible to do in a national study like this, and can easily make gamesmanship seem a lot simpler than it actually is.