Democracy, Current Events

Links on Voting and Voting Behavior

1. I discuss third party voting (including the myth that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000) on Al Jazeera’s The Stream. At the very end, I blame bad media on bad voters–mainstream media sucks because of how we consume information.

2. Do hormones influence women’s voting behavior? Kristina Durante and her colleagues think so. CNN posted an article, but a bunch of uninformed, ignorant fools reacted with anger, and CNN yanked the paper. However, psychologists have already shown that hormones and hormone fluctuations affect and change a wide range of our preferences, so it would be surprising if political preferences were an exception to this rule.

3. Andrew Healy on how football scores affect voting for incumbents. I mentioned this research to students at Richmond and Hampden-Sydney over the past two weeks, and they found it shocking. Healy is already known for his work on how voters punish incumbents for bad weather.

4. Howard Stern toys with low information Obama voters. Stern: “Do you think Obama made the right choice choosing Paul Ryan as his vice president?” Obama supporter: “Yes.” Of course, Republicans are not high information on average, either, though the median Republican is slightly more high information than the median Democrat.

 

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