Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improvements in public records, we conduct the first-ever fifty-state vote validation. We parse overreporting due to response bias from overreporting due to inaccurate respondents. We find that nonvoters who are politically engaged and equipped with politically relevant resources consistently misreport that they voted. This finding cannot be explained by faulty registration records, which we measure with new indicators of election administration quality. Respondents are found to misreport only on survey items associated with socially desirable outcomes, which we find by validating items beyond voting, like race and party. We show that studies of representation and participation based on survey reports dramatically misestimate the differences between voters and nonvoters.

Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters' identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group-members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to these questions help us grapple with the evolving relationship between voters and candidates in a rapidly changing information environment. Our results suggest that voters rarely prefer targeted pandering to general messages and that "mistargeted" voters penalize candidates enough to erase the positive returns to targeting. Theoretically, targeting may allow candidates to quietly promise particularistic benefits to narrow audiences, thereby altering the nature of political representation, but voters seem to prefer being solicited based on broad principles and collective benefits.

Physicians frequently interact with patients about politically salient health issues, such as drug use, firearm safety, and sexual behavior. We investigate whether physicians' own political views affect their treatment decisions on these issues. We linked the records of over 20,000 primary care physicians in 29 US states to a voter registration database, obtaining the physicians' political party affiliations. We then surveyed a sample of Democratic and Republican primary care physicians. Respondents evaluated nine patient vignettes, three of which addressed especially politicized health issues (marijuana, abortion, and firearm storage). Physicians rated the seriousness of the issue presented in each vignette and their likelihood of engaging in specific management options. On the politicized health issues-and only on such issues-Democratic and Republican physicians differed substantially in their expressed concern and their recommended treatment plan. We control for physician demographics (like age, gender, and religiosity), patient population, and geography. Physician partisan bias can lead to unwarranted variation in patient care. Awareness of how a physician's political attitudes might affect patient care is important to physicians and patients alike.primary care | physicians | partisanship | politics | health care

A s a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign's behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters' priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign.

This article investigates the long-term effect of September 11, 2001 on the political behaviors of victims' families and neighbors. Relative to comparable individuals, family members and residential neighbors of victims have become-and have stayed-significantly more active in politics in the last 12 years, and they have become more Republican on account of the terrorist attacks. The method used to demonstrate these findings leverages the random nature of the terrorist attack to estimate a causal effect and exploits new techniques to link multiple, individual-level, governmental databases to measure behavioral change without relying on surveys or aggregate analysis.terrorism | political participation | voting | big data | matching S eptember 11, 2001's (hereafter 9/11) effect on the UnitedStates population has been a topic of intrigue across the social sciences for the last 12 years. Short-term and long-term changes stemming from the attacks may help us understand how common citizens react to the stress and threat of mass terrorism. Following 9/11, researchers found heightened levels of posttraumatic stress across the country (1), especially close to the New York attacks (2), as well as increases in individuals' trust in government (3) and conservative political attitudes (4). Heightened levels of stress and threat are linked to authoritarian political attitudes (5-7). Changes in political attitudes are consequential and measurable outcomes of the psychological effects of politicized violence.Estimating the specific and long-term effects of the attacks on the families and neighbors of victims aids our understanding of terrorism, but also sheds light on individuals who have substantial influence in the shaping of public policy. Changes in the law often come when policy equilibria are punctuated by sudden events (8). September 11th was one such event, resulting in policy shifts in domestic security and foreign relations. However, 9/11 is just one example: natural disasters, acts of gun violence, child abductions, even corporate scandals can serve as shocks that catalyze long-lasting policy change. Victims of politicized tragedies can play an important role in shaping policy change. For example, parents of children murdered in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting have become active in lobbying Congress to amend gun laws (for other examples, consult ref. 9). Families of 9/11 victims became similarly involved in politics following the attacks, primarily lobbying policymakers to advance anti-terrorism laws. (See, for example, the following organizations: Families of September 11th, 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, Voices of September 11th, and September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.) Americans who lost loved ones in 9/11 are thus not only a population of interest for their connection to a major historical event, but their behavior holds lessons for understanding policy influence following system shocks.To estimate behavioral change among 9/11 victims' families and neighbors, I used a method of an...