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Where should you cast your vote?
Jonah Berger, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, conducted a terrific study where he demonstrates that where people vote affects how they vote. Essentially, people whose voting booth is located in a church are more likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire houses care more about safety, and people voting in a school tend to put more weight on things like education.
Admittedly there is a problem here of isolating causation. Perhaps you go to the polls whose location you know, and if you have kids you know how to find the school, if you are religious you know how to find the church, and so on.
Auren Hoffman, whom I will see next week in Quebec City, concludes:
Your gut might be much better at telling you what not to do than giving you good direction on what to do. If your gut tells you something is wrong with someone, than you probably do not want to entrust your kid with her. But a positive gut-check often does little good (at least for me).
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 18, 2008 at 07:13 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
"Perhaps you go to the polls whose location you know"
I don't know how it works where you live but everywhere I've lived (New York state, Idaho, and Pennsylvania) you have to go to a particular polling place depending on where you live- you don't get a choice of them.
Posted by: Matt at Jul 18, 2008 7:25:49 AM
I thought virtually no one had the opportunity to choose a polling place. Everywhere I lived, I was assigned a single polling place. I never had a choice. Therefore, we would need to find some more evidence to establish causality. I thought about looking at voting patterns in new communities, but even there, the polling place may have been chosen based on the sense of the people who live there. I would be most likely to believe data that examined voting behavior before and after a polling-place shift where the reason for the shift was something unanticipated, such as the original polling place becoming unusable (say due to fire, flood, asbestos, etc.)
Posted by: Craig at Jul 18, 2008 7:30:51 AM
You chaps vote in CHURCHES? I do learn a lot from this blog.
Posted by: dearieme at Jul 18, 2008 7:32:06 AM
When I lived in Tucson, Arizona, we could choose locations.
Posted by: Jason Brennan at Jul 18, 2008 7:43:24 AM
Since when do people get to choose their polling location? Everywhere I've lived (Minnesota, Montana, Virginia, etc.) has assigned a polling location.
Posted by: Ben at Jul 18, 2008 7:52:29 AM
CA, FL, ID, OH all have assigned polling districts. They have to do that to make sure that you are voting on the
proper candidates, issues, etc.
Posted by: Dave at Jul 18, 2008 8:33:36 AM
The introduction to the study makes clear that the subjects of the study were assigned to their polling places. No choice involved.
The study also does not show that "people whose voting booth is located in a church are more likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire houses care more about safety." It’s one study on one vote (plus some experimental data on voting about funding public schools) on an education initiative in a school vs. voting on that same initiative in a non-school.
It’s been a long time since I took econometrics, but a .845% increase in the likelihood of voting in approval seems small to me. And this is a study of the effect of being in a school while voting on school funding, which is direct. Indirect effects on other issues would be far smaller.
Posted by: ostap at Jul 18, 2008 8:34:46 AM
In Texas if you early vote, you can chose where you where you vote--usually grocery stores, libraries and courthouses. If you vote on voting day, you have to go to your assign polling place which is hardly ever a church but more likely a school. I usually early vote at a grocery store. Does that mean I vote with my gut?
Posted by: Carter B at Jul 18, 2008 8:41:37 AM
Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see any connection whatsoever between Hoffman's "conclusion" and Berger's study. It's a complete non sequitur.
Did you accidentally mix up paragraphs from two different posts, Prof. Cowen?
Posted by: Brock at Jul 18, 2008 8:41:47 AM
I've lived in New Jersey, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania--all had *assigned* polling places. And, Tyler, you've outed yourself as a non-voter: Virginia has assigned voting places, too.
(Mine was in a church but I voted for Ron Paul--on non-interventionist grounds--anyway.)
Posted by: rqm at Jul 18, 2008 9:03:45 AM
Color me skeptical about any causation. I interpret this as some variation on: -Communities with lots of churches are more likely to have both church polling places and voters who care about social issues; voters who live within polling place range of a church are more likely to care about social issues
-Communities with relatively few polling place options besides the fire house are more likely to be the kind of small community where voters care about public safety/know the local public safety workers personally
-Voters who live within polling place assignment range of schools are more likely to have school-age children and care more about education.
etc.
Posted by: Noah at Jul 18, 2008 9:52:24 AM
I agree with the last poster. The endogeneity is probably at the community level (where polling places are chosen in most communities). If the community is religious, there are probably lots of churches that are willing to rent out space. If there is a big gym or auditorium available, the community built it, etc.
Posted by: Michael Kelly at Jul 18, 2008 10:38:47 AM
So we should all vote at the county jail!
Posted by: Jeff at Jul 18, 2008 11:24:12 AM
The study controlled for a bunch of things, including whether the person lives near a school, and still found the effect of voting in a school. They also had a follow-up study where they found the same type of effect with pure random assignment (but no actual voting), where people looked at photos of buildings (either schools, churches, or generic buildings) and then indicated how they would vote on various initiatives. Here's an article with more detail, if you don't want to read the paper.
Posted by: James at Jul 18, 2008 1:07:06 PM
I've seen polling places in churches, schools, community centers, and people's garages.
Posted by: Anthony Argyriou at Jul 18, 2008 1:29:32 PM
Now, in Oregon, we've had exclusively Vote-by-Mail balloting for about ten years now. You can still find ballot drop-boxes at a number of the traditional locations, but I wonder if anybody has bothered studying us as a sort of control subject.
How does voting at home affect you choices? How about the nearest bar? How about the nearest strip club?*
*Note: I do not actually know of any strip clubs, even in Portland, which have ballot drop boxes. It would be hard to underwrite that study with grant money, anyway.
Posted by: George at Jul 18, 2008 2:43:37 PM
Here in San Francisco, I vote in my neighbor's garage. What does that say about how I'll vote?
Posted by: Kelly at Jul 18, 2008 3:44:04 PM
Some thoughts:
1) I'm glad other people jumped on the "you go where you know". Having worked on getting people elected in various states and localities in the US, I don't know of one that *does* let people choose where they vote. Does anybody know of one?
2) I'm more with James than Noah. *Pictures* of these places led to different voting behavior.
3) But I'm more with Prof. McCloskey (sp?) than either--the effect just isn't that big. It has no oomph. The author was on NPR's "All Things Considered" a few weeks ago and said something to the effect that the election would have to be phenomenally close, and the polling places thoroughly slanted to the advantage of one side of the issue, before this effect would be changing any outcomes.
Posted by: Jared at Jul 18, 2008 6:22:12 PM
And anyway, polling places are virtually obsolete. Most of us are moving to vote by mail. It's complete in Oregon (no polling places at all any more), and here in Seattle it's about 70% by mail. Expect that to go to 100% at some time in the next couple years.
Posted by: James Moore at Jul 19, 2008 9:06:40 PM
Texas, you may be able to choose where you can vote early (in a big city), but there's still a line, and the polling places are still set up by district.
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