The concept of costs is familiar one in the voter turnout literature. A large literature is devoted to understanding how voter registration costs can increase or decrease turnout. Much less extant work has focused on the role of information costs in voting. We use redistricting as a method for isolating the role of information costs in the decision to turnout. Redistricting allows us to hold di...

Exposure and adoption of opinions in social networks are important questions in education, business, and government. We describe a novel application of pervasive computing based on using mobile phone sensors to measure and model the face-to-face interactions and subsequent opinion changes amongst undergraduates, during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. We find that self-reported polit...

This paper examines the connection between people’s trust or cynicism in major U.S. institutions and their vote cast for President in the 2000 election. The absence of confidence and trust fuels cynicism, an attitude that may lead elites to exploit institutional resources and the public to withdraw their support from important institutions. We examined the 13 measures of confidence-trust in the...

In traditional models, votes are an expression of preferences and beliefs. Psychological theories of cognitive dissonance suggest, however, that behavior may shape preferences. In this view, the very act of voting may influence political attitudes. A vote for a candidate may lead to more favorable interpretations of his actions in the future. We test the empirical relevance of cognitive dissona...

People's voting behavior has a great impact on the political road that is taken in our countries. The current research shows that mimicry, the imitation of nonverbal behavior, unconsciously affects our political voting behavior. Earlier research has shown that mimicry enhances prosocial thoughts and behaviors. As prosocial people are expected to be more attracted to left-wing parties, it was pr...

The authors wish to thank the Louisiana Secretary of State's office for providing access to these data, the DIGIT lab at the University of Utah for their work integrating these data with Census and other data, and Delia Bailey who provided us with R programming assistance. Previous versions of this research were presented at the 2007 and 2008 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting...

Previously we and others have shown evidence for genetic influences on political attitudes and sociodemographic indicators (Martin 1987; Posner et al. 1996; Truett et al. 1992; Eaves et al. 1999). However, the nature of the relationship between political attitudes, social indictors and voting behavior has not been investigated. While heritability estimates for social and political attitudes hav...

This paper reviews a variety of criteria which have been proposed for legislative and congressional redistricting in the US and discusses the political and legal factors which have shaped 1980s redistricting. Particular attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between incumbents (seeking re-election), party organizations (seeking aggregate partisan advantage), minority interests (seeking ...