Does information irrelevant to government performance affect voting behavior? If so, how does this help us understand the mechanisms underlying voters' retrospective assessments of candidates' performance in office? To precisely test for the effects of irrelevant information, we explore the electoral impact of local college football games just before an election, irrelevant events that government has nothing to do with and for which no government response would be expected. We find that a win in the 10 d before Election Day causes the incumbent to receive an additional 1.61 percentage points of the vote in Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections, with the effect being larger for teams with stronger fan support. In addition to conducting placebo tests based on postelection games, we demonstrate these effects by using the betting market's estimate of a team's probability of winning the game before it occurs to isolate the surprise component of game outcomes. We corroborate these aggregate-level results with a survey that we conducted during the 2009 NCAA men's college basketball tournament, where we find that surprising wins and losses affect presidential approval. An experiment embedded within the survey also indicates that personal well-being may influence voting decisions on a subconscious level. We find that making people more aware of the reasons for their current state of mind reduces the effect that irrelevant events have on their opinions. These findings underscore the subtle power of irrelevant events in shaping important real-world decisions and suggest ways in which decision making can be improved.decision making | political science | psychology | emotions | voting V oting is among the most important activities undertaken by citizens in democratic societies. Given the importance of election outcomes, one would hope that individual voters make decisions in a careful and reasoned manner. Models of rational behavior posit that people behave in such a way, basing their voting decisions on relevant data such as evaluations of incumbent performance (1) or reasoned consideration of candidate stances on policy issues (2). But could information and events irrelevant to government performance, yet still consequential to an individual's sense of wellbeing, affect the decisions that voters make in the polling booth? To answer this question, we explore whether local sporting outcomes affect the electoral fortunes of incumbent politicians.Researchers have noted that people often transfer emotions in one domain toward evaluation and judgment in a completely separate domain (e.g., refs. 3-6). For instance, being in a sad mood has been shown to cause people to overestimate the frequency of sad events in their lives (7). When evaluating others, people whose sense of well-being is high (low) have been shown to spend more time focusing on and learning about the positive (negative) characteristics of experimental targets (8). These effects are often heightened in complex and uncertain situations (9). Similar resea...

What explains variation in individuals' opposition to immigration? While scholars have consistently shown cultural concerns to be strong predictors of opposition, findings regarding the labor-market competition hypothesis are highly contested. To help understand these divergent results, we distinguish between the prevalence and conditional impact of determinants of immigration attitudes. Leveraging a targeted sampling strategy of high-technology counties, we conduct a study of Americans' attitudes toward H-1B visas. The plurality of these visas are occupied by Indian immigrants, who are skilled but ethnically distinct, enabling us to measure a specific skill set (high technology) that is threatened by a particular type of immigrant (H-1B visa holders). Unlike recent aggregate studies, our targeted approach reveals that the conditional impact of the relationship in the high-technology sector between economic threat and immigration attitudes is sizable. However, labor-market competition is not a prevalent source of threat and therefore is generally not detected in aggregate analyses.

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How does social exclusion on the basis of racial/ethnic identity affect partisanship and political attitudes? Drawing on sociological research on the group basis of partisanship and psychological theories of social identity, we contend that exclusion at the individual level stemming from racial/ethnic group membership can affect political identity. People who feel that a political party excludes them from the American social fabric based on their race/ethnicity should be less likely to perceive that party as serving their group's interests and therefore less likely to support that party. We apply our theory to Asian Americans, an understudied minority population that is becoming increasingly politically relevant. Through both a large-scale, representative survey and a novel laboratory experiment, we find empirical support for our principal hypothesis. Our findings partly explain why Asian Americans are overwhelmingly likely to identify as Democrats and advance an identity-oriented explanation of partisanship in American electoral politics.