Scholars and political observers have suggested that television has ‘‘personalized’’ voting behavior in American presidential elections by encouraging citizens to cast ballots on the basis of candidate image and personality. Though an oft-heard assertion, little solid evidence exists that this is true, and the reinvigoration of partisanship and the persistence of ideological conflict suggest pe...

This paper investigates how newspaper consumption a ects political engagement. To circumvent potential endogeneity issues, I use variation in European languages as an instrument for newspaper consumption. Speci cally, I consider variation in how much physical space languages require to express some given information content. I rst estimate such language e ciency from large bilingual text compil...

We model a two-alternative election in which voters may acquire information about which is the best alternative for all voters. Voters differ in their cost of acquiring information. We show that as the number of voters increases, the fraction of voters who acquire information declines to zero. However, if the support of the cost distribution is not bounded away from zero, there is an equilibriu...

It is often argued in the e-voting community that in the presence of write-in candidates, forced abstention attacks are always possible. Therefore, write-in candidates are often excluded in existing definitions of coercion-resistance arguing that those definitions cannot be achieved by write-in supporting schemes. This is only true if the tally is made public directly. Coercionresistance may we...

Using a representative longitudinal survey of U.S. teenagers, we investigate how peer racial composition in high school affects individual turnout young adults. We exploit across-cohort, within-school differences composition. One standard deviation increase the diversity index leads to 2.2 percent probability being registered vote seven years later and 2.6 higher voting six later. These effects...