Recently, many states have reversed the decades-long trend of facilitating ballot access by enacting a wave of laws requesting or requiring identification from registrants before they vote. Identification laws, however, are not an entirely new phenomenon. We offer new theoretical insights regarding how changes in political power influence the adoption of identification laws. In the most extensive analysis to date, we use event history analysis to examine why states adopted a range of identification laws over the past several decades. We consistently find that the propensity to adopt is greatest when control of the governor’s office and legislature switches to Republicans (relationships not previously identified), and that this likelihood increases further as the size of Black and Latino populations in the state expands. We also find that federal legislation in the form of the Help America Vote Act seems to enhance the effects of switches in partisan control.

One of the most important recent developments in social psychology is the discovery of minor interventions that have large and enduring effects on behavior. A leading example of this class of results is in the work by Bryan et al. [Bryan CJ, Walton GM, Rogers T, Dweck CS (2011) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(31):12653-12656], which shows that administering a set of survey items worded so that subjects think of themselves as voters (noun treatment) rather than as voting (verb treatment) substantially increases political participation (voter turnout) among subjects. We revisit these experiments by replicating and extending their research design in a large-scale field experiment. In contrast to the 11 to 14% point greater turnout among those exposed to the noun rather than the verb treatment reported in the work by Bryan et al., we find no statistically significant difference in turnout between the noun and verb treatments (the point estimate of the difference is approximately zero). Furthermore, when we benchmark these treatments against a standard get out the vote message, we estimate that both are less effective at increasing turnout than a much shorter basic mobilization message. In our conclusion, we detail how our study differs from the work by Bryan et al. and discuss how our results might be interpreted.R ecent work in social psychology has shown that very modest alterations in how a decision is described or structured can have outsized effects on the choices that people make. The discovery of brief interventions that dramatically alter behavior has been called "one of the most exciting developments in psychological science in recent years," and the spectacular behavioral responses that follow minor interventions are described by one proponent as so remarkable that they sound more like "science fiction than science." Indeed, much of what is now accepted science in fields outside of psychology, from mold that cures deadly infections to power plants that transform a few tons of uranium into the energy to light a city, would once have seemed like science fiction. Walton (1) has labeled these new approaches "wise interventions," with the double meaning that they are both brilliantly effective and also savvy to the subtle truths of our psychology.A prominent example of this new approach, in which a brief intervention is crafted based on a psychological theory, is a study showing how a minor difference in survey wording leads to large differences in the respondents' voting in elections (i.e., their turnout behavior). [This study is one of three featured in the recent article by Walton (1) promoting "wise interventions."] In a PNAS article, Bryan et al. (2) show that subtle linguistic differences in how the act of voting is framed can have large effects on participation. Bryan et al. (2) ground their theoretical argument in prior work showing that a behavior described using noun wording is perceived as a more stable and permanent attribute than a behavior described using a verb (3, 4). This distinction extends to self...

This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison The rise in mass incarceration provides a growing impetus to understand the effect that interactions with the criminal justice system have on political participation. While a substantial body of prior research studies the political consequences of criminal disenfranchisement, less work examines why eligible ex-felons vote at very low rates. We use administrative data on voting and interactions with the criminal justice system from Pennsylvania to assess whether the association between incarceration and reduced voting is causal. Using administrative records that reduce the possibility of measurement error, we employ several different research designs to investigate the possibility that the observed negative correlation between incarceration and voting might result from differences across individuals that both lead to incarceration and low participation. As this selection bias issue is addressed, we find that the estimated effect of serving time in prison on voting falls dramatically and for some research designs vanishes entirely.

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The Standards Committee of the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association has produced reporting guidelines that aim to increase the clarity of experimental research reports. This paper describes the Committee's rationale for the guidelines it developed and includes our Recommended Reporting Standards for Experiments (Laboratory, Field, Survey). It begins with a content analysis of current reporting practices in published experimental research. Although researchers report most important aspects of their experimental designs and data, we find substantial omissions that could undermine the clarity of research practices and the ability of researchers to assess the validity of study conclusions. With the need for reporting guidelines established, the report describes the process the Committee used to develop the guidelines, the feedback received during the comment period, and the rationale for the final version of the guidelines.