Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo! News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people

Beyond Survey Self-Reports: Using Physiology to Tap Political Orientations

“…Studies using selfreport and implicit measures (Payne et al, 2010;Pasek et al, 2009;Greenwald et al, 2009) find unique effects for each just as we find unique effects for physiological measures and self-report.…”

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From Black and White to Left and Right: Race, Perceptions of Candidates’ Ideologies, and Voting Behavior in U.S. House Elections

“…After all, voters in majority-white districts rarely elect 1 An exception seems to be research on the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. Highton (2011), Jacobsmeier and Lewis (2013), Lewis-Beck et al (2010), Pasek et al (2009), Piston (2010), Schaffner (2011), and Tesler and Sears (2010) all find that race had a significant impact on Obama's electoral fortunes. However, given the unique features of presidential election campaigns and the historic nature of Obama's election, it would be a mistake to make generalizations about the effects of the race of candidates on elections based solely on the 2008 presidential election.…”

“Race Matters” in the Obama Era

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