Rebecca B Morton
Biographic Data
| ID | 1126412 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca B Morton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca B |
| FAMILY NAME | Morton |
| SIGNATURE | MORTON R B |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8662-1657 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 301 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Experimental Methods for Measuring Social Networks without Censoring
We elicit social networks among students in an Italian high school either by measuring the complete network in an incentive-compatible way or by using a truncated elicitation of at most five links. We find that truncation undercounts weak links by up to 90% but only moderately undercounts the time spent with strong friends. We use simulations to demonstrate that the measurement error induced by censoring might be particularly significant when stu…
Pork versus Policy: Experimental Evidence on Majoritarian Bargaining with Real-World Consequences
Pork-barrel politics has long attracted controversy; difficult to prove and vigorously denied by those accused of it, the practice is nevertheless defended by others who argue that pork facilitates compromise. We design a novel field-in-the-lab experiment to study how legislators bargain over pork and real-world policy. We first introduce a new incentivized method to measure subjects’ ideological peak preferences and attitudinal strength. Subject…
Analytical thinking, prosocial voting, and intergroup competition: Experimental evidence from China
Run-off Elections in the Laboratory
We study experimentally the properties of the majority run-off system and compare them to those of plurality rule. Our focus is on Duverger’s famous prediction that the plurality rule leads to higher co-ordination of votes on a limited number of candidates than the majority run-off rule. We find strong co-ordination forces under both systems. However, as predicted by the theory, in some cases these forces are stronger under plurality. Despite the…
Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests
We present an informational theory of public protests, according to which public protests allow citizens to aggregate privately dispersed information and signal it to the policy maker. The model predicts that information sharing of signals within social groups can facilitate information aggregation when the social groups are sufficiently large even when it is not predicted with individual signals. We use experiments in the laboratory and on Amazo…
Negative campaigns, interpersonal trust, and prosocial behavior: The mediating effect of democratic experience
Public Voting and Prosocial Behavior
One argument against secret ballots is that such procedures lead to more selfish voting behavior and that public voting can increase prosocial voting and the likelihood of prosocial outcomes when voters are not subject to intimidation and coercion from outside interests. We investigate this supposition as well as voter preferences over observability in voting in this context. We find that voters are significantly more likely to choose unselfishly…
Saying versus doing: A new donation method for measuring ideal points
Farewell to Jeps
It is hard to believe that we have been at this for four years, but our term as editors is coming to a close. During this time, JEPS has gone from being little more than an idea in a few people's minds to a full fledged journal with robust submissions, excellent reviewers, and valuable published research from a wide range of scholars featuring all different types of experimental analyses employed in the study of politics. We are extremely excited…
Experiments, Journals, and Ethics
As political science experiments have increasingly moved out of the traditional western university laboratory setting, researchers have had to confront many new issues that had previously received less attention from experimentalists. Much ink and effort has been expended on the methodological issues involved due to the loss of experimental control and the difficulty in implementing and maintaining true random assignment. Moreover, as experimenta…
Welcome to Jeps
It is with great pleasure that we welcome readers to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Experimental Politics ( JEPS) . JEPS is the official journal of the Organized Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) on Experimental Research. We are greatly honored to have been selected by the section as the first editors of the journal, and wanted to take this opportunity to briefly share with readers our vision for the journal, som…
Communication and Voting in Multi‐party Elections: An Experimental Study
We investigate communication and costly voting in multi‐party election experiments. Turnout is consistently lower across electorate communication as compared with restricted communication within parties. Voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication but more likely to start deliberation by stating their first preference when unrestricted. Distributions of earnings are more inequitable when …
Political Economy Experiments: Introduction
Journal Article Political Economy Experiments: Introduction Get access Rebecca Morton Rebecca Morton New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 124, Issue 574, February 2014, Pages F129–F130, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12121 Published: 24 February 2014
The Effects of Identities, Incentives, and Information on Voting
We report on majority voting experiments where subjects are randomly assigned identities in common with a candidate. However, subjects sometimes receive a financial incentive from voting contrary to their identity. We vary the size of the incentive as well as information voters have about the advantage of the incentive. We find that subjects are influenced by their assigned identities, and the effect is stronger when voters have less information.…
Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab
Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignm…
Tactical coalition voting and information in the laboratory
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
Methods and Models: A Guide to the Empirical Analysis of Formal Models in Political Science
At present much of political science consists of a large body of formal mathematical work that remains largely unexplored empirically and an expanding use of sophisticated statistical techniques. While there are examples of noteworthy efforts to bridge the gap between these, there is still a need for much more cooperative work between formal theorists and empirical researchers in the discipline. This book explores how empirical analysis has, can,…
Information Asymmetries and Simultaneous versus Sequential Voting
Sequential voting takes place when some voters make choices with knowledge of earlier decisions in the same election. Historically, voting in U.S. presidential primaries is sequential, but recent primaries have been "front-loaded" into the early weeks of the season. We explore sequential voting in drawn-out primaries and simultaneous voting in front-loaded ones theoretically and use laboratory elections to examine our predictions empirically. We …
Minority Representation in Multimember Districts
Given the recent court rulings against racial gerrymandering, the effect of multimember district elections on minority representation is an important issue. We present a model of voting in double-member district elections with two majority candidates and one minority candidate and consider the voting equilibria under straight and cumulative voting. In straight voting, while an equilibrium always exists in which the two majority candidates are exp…
Constituent errors in assessing their Senators
Retrospective Voting and Political Mobility
Research on political mobility has ignored the impact that the past policy decisions of officials may have on the probability of achieving a elected office. A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that voters and party members will evaluate incumbents based on past behavior, that is, retrospectively. We test the extent nonincumbent candidates anticipate that voters in primaries and general elections will choose retrospectively, util…
Promising directions in public choice
Redistribution, Income, and Voting
A model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross-sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed. Voting is modeled as a group rational activity. Voter turnout rates in the United States for the 1948, 1960, 1968, and 1980 elections are used to test the model. Voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution. …
Incomplete Information and Ideological Explanations of Platform Divergence
One of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates. A solution is that candidates are ideological (have policy preferences). When candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences, then platform divergence is theoretically predicted. E…
Groups in Rational Turnout Models
A model of the strategic calculus of voting that incorporates the behavior of groups is presented. If candidates choose different positions, positive turnout is possible in (partial) equilibrium and is generally larger than that without group rationality. Nevertheless, if candidates are probability maximizers and a unique (general) equilibrium exists, the candidates will choose equivalent positions and turnout will be zero even with group rationa…
Redistribution, Income, and Voting
A model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross-sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed. Voting is modeled as a group rational activity. Voter turnout rates in the United States for the 1948, 1960, 1968, and 1980 elections are used to test the model. Voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution. …
Minority Representation in Multimember Districts
Given the recent court rulings against racial gerrymandering, the effect of multimember district elections on minority representation is an important issue. We present a model of voting in double-member district elections with two majority candidates and one minority candidate and consider the voting equilibria under straight and cumulative voting. In straight voting, while an equilibrium always exists in which the two majority candidates are exp…
Incomplete Information and Ideological Explanations of Platform Divergence
One of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates. A solution is that candidates are ideological (have policy preferences). When candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences, then platform divergence is theoretically predicted. E…
Information Asymmetries and Simultaneous versus Sequential Voting
Sequential voting takes place when some voters make choices with knowledge of earlier decisions in the same election. Historically, voting in U.S. presidential primaries is sequential, but recent primaries have been "front-loaded" into the early weeks of the season. We explore sequential voting in drawn-out primaries and simultaneous voting in front-loaded ones theoretically and use laboratory elections to examine our predictions empirically. We …
The Effects of Identities, Incentives, and Information on Voting
We report on majority voting experiments where subjects are randomly assigned identities in common with a candidate. However, subjects sometimes receive a financial incentive from voting contrary to their identity. We vary the size of the incentive as well as information voters have about the advantage of the incentive. We find that subjects are influenced by their assigned identities, and the effect is stronger when voters have less information.…
Retrospective Voting and Political Mobility
Research on political mobility has ignored the impact that the past policy decisions of officials may have on the probability of achieving a elected office. A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that voters and party members will evaluate incumbents based on past behavior, that is, retrospectively. We test the extent nonincumbent candidates anticipate that voters in primaries and general elections will choose retrospectively, util…
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
Tactical coalition voting and information in the laboratory
Constituent errors in assessing their Senators
Public Voting and Prosocial Behavior
One argument against secret ballots is that such procedures lead to more selfish voting behavior and that public voting can increase prosocial voting and the likelihood of prosocial outcomes when voters are not subject to intimidation and coercion from outside interests. We investigate this supposition as well as voter preferences over observability in voting in this context. We find that voters are significantly more likely to choose unselfishly…
Experiments, Journals, and Ethics
As political science experiments have increasingly moved out of the traditional western university laboratory setting, researchers have had to confront many new issues that had previously received less attention from experimentalists. Much ink and effort has been expended on the methodological issues involved due to the loss of experimental control and the difficulty in implementing and maintaining true random assignment. Moreover, as experimenta…
Communication and Voting in Multi‐party Elections: An Experimental Study
We investigate communication and costly voting in multi‐party election experiments. Turnout is consistently lower across electorate communication as compared with restricted communication within parties. Voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication but more likely to start deliberation by stating their first preference when unrestricted. Distributions of earnings are more inequitable when …
Pork versus Policy: Experimental Evidence on Majoritarian Bargaining with Real-World Consequences
Pork-barrel politics has long attracted controversy; difficult to prove and vigorously denied by those accused of it, the practice is nevertheless defended by others who argue that pork facilitates compromise. We design a novel field-in-the-lab experiment to study how legislators bargain over pork and real-world policy. We first introduce a new incentivized method to measure subjects’ ideological peak preferences and attitudinal strength. Subject…
Analytical thinking, prosocial voting, and intergroup competition: Experimental evidence from China
Run-off Elections in the Laboratory
We study experimentally the properties of the majority run-off system and compare them to those of plurality rule. Our focus is on Duverger’s famous prediction that the plurality rule leads to higher co-ordination of votes on a limited number of candidates than the majority run-off rule. We find strong co-ordination forces under both systems. However, as predicted by the theory, in some cases these forces are stronger under plurality. Despite the…
Negative campaigns, interpersonal trust, and prosocial behavior: The mediating effect of democratic experience
Political Economy Experiments: Introduction
Journal Article Political Economy Experiments: Introduction Get access Rebecca Morton Rebecca Morton New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 124, Issue 574, February 2014, Pages F129–F130, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12121 Published: 24 February 2014
An analysis of legislative inefficiency and ideological behavior
Saying versus doing: A new donation method for measuring ideal points
Welcome to Jeps
It is with great pleasure that we welcome readers to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Experimental Politics ( JEPS) . JEPS is the official journal of the Organized Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) on Experimental Research. We are greatly honored to have been selected by the section as the first editors of the journal, and wanted to take this opportunity to briefly share with readers our vision for the journal, som…
Promising directions in public choice
An analysis of legislative inefficiency and ideological behavior
Groups in Rational Turnout Models
A model of the strategic calculus of voting that incorporates the behavior of groups is presented. If candidates choose different positions, positive turnout is possible in (partial) equilibrium and is generally larger than that without group rationality. Nevertheless, if candidates are probability maximizers and a unique (general) equilibrium exists, the candidates will choose equivalent positions and turnout will be zero even with group rationa…
Revealed Preferences for Property Taxes: An Empirical Study of Perceived Tax Incidence
Pamela H. Moomau, Rebecca B. Morton, Revealed Preferences for Property Taxes: An Empirical Study of Perceived Tax Incidence, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 176-179
Promising directions in public choice
Redistribution, Income, and Voting
A model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross-sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed. Voting is modeled as a group rational activity. Voter turnout rates in the United States for the 1948, 1960, 1968, and 1980 elections are used to test the model. Voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution. …
Incomplete Information and Ideological Explanations of Platform Divergence
One of the paradoxes of formal spatial voting models is the robustness of the theoretical result that candidates will converge toward centrists positions and the empirical observation of persistent policy divergence of candidates. A solution is that candidates are ideological (have policy preferences). When candidates have policy preferences and incomplete information about voter preferences, then platform divergence is theoretically predicted. E…
Retrospective Voting and Political Mobility
Research on political mobility has ignored the impact that the past policy decisions of officials may have on the probability of achieving a elected office. A large theoretical and empirical literature suggests that voters and party members will evaluate incumbents based on past behavior, that is, retrospectively. We test the extent nonincumbent candidates anticipate that voters in primaries and general elections will choose retrospectively, util…
Constituent errors in assessing their Senators
Minority Representation in Multimember Districts
Given the recent court rulings against racial gerrymandering, the effect of multimember district elections on minority representation is an important issue. We present a model of voting in double-member district elections with two majority candidates and one minority candidate and consider the voting equilibria under straight and cumulative voting. In straight voting, while an equilibrium always exists in which the two majority candidates are exp…
Methods and Models: A Guide to the Empirical Analysis of Formal Models in Political Science
At present much of political science consists of a large body of formal mathematical work that remains largely unexplored empirically and an expanding use of sophisticated statistical techniques. While there are examples of noteworthy efforts to bridge the gap between these, there is still a need for much more cooperative work between formal theorists and empirical researchers in the discipline. This book explores how empirical analysis has, can,…
Information Asymmetries and Simultaneous versus Sequential Voting
Sequential voting takes place when some voters make choices with knowledge of earlier decisions in the same election. Historically, voting in U.S. presidential primaries is sequential, but recent primaries have been "front-loaded" into the early weeks of the season. We explore sequential voting in drawn-out primaries and simultaneous voting in front-loaded ones theoretically and use laboratory elections to examine our predictions empirically. We …
Efficiency, Equity, and Timing of Voting Mechanisms
We compare the behavior of voters under simultaneous and sequential voting rules when voting is costly and information is incomplete. In many political institutions, ranging from small committees to mass elections, voting is sequential, which allows some voters to know the choices of earlier voters. For a stylized model, we generate a variety of predictions about the relative efficiency and participation equity of these two systems, which we test…
Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab
Increasingly, political scientists use the term 'experiment' or 'experimental' to describe their empirical research. One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignm…
Tactical coalition voting and information in the laboratory
The Effects of Identities, Incentives, and Information on Voting
We report on majority voting experiments where subjects are randomly assigned identities in common with a candidate. However, subjects sometimes receive a financial incentive from voting contrary to their identity. We vary the size of the incentive as well as information voters have about the advantage of the incentive. We find that subjects are influenced by their assigned identities, and the effect is stronger when voters have less information.…
Experiments, Journals, and Ethics
As political science experiments have increasingly moved out of the traditional western university laboratory setting, researchers have had to confront many new issues that had previously received less attention from experimentalists. Much ink and effort has been expended on the methodological issues involved due to the loss of experimental control and the difficulty in implementing and maintaining true random assignment. Moreover, as experimenta…
Welcome to Jeps
It is with great pleasure that we welcome readers to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Experimental Politics ( JEPS) . JEPS is the official journal of the Organized Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) on Experimental Research. We are greatly honored to have been selected by the section as the first editors of the journal, and wanted to take this opportunity to briefly share with readers our vision for the journal, som…
Communication and Voting in Multi‐party Elections: An Experimental Study
We investigate communication and costly voting in multi‐party election experiments. Turnout is consistently lower across electorate communication as compared with restricted communication within parties. Voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication but more likely to start deliberation by stating their first preference when unrestricted. Distributions of earnings are more inequitable when …
Political Economy Experiments: Introduction
Journal Article Political Economy Experiments: Introduction Get access Rebecca Morton Rebecca Morton New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 124, Issue 574, February 2014, Pages F129–F130, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12121 Published: 24 February 2014
Farewell to Jeps
It is hard to believe that we have been at this for four years, but our term as editors is coming to a close. During this time, JEPS has gone from being little more than an idea in a few people's minds to a full fledged journal with robust submissions, excellent reviewers, and valuable published research from a wide range of scholars featuring all different types of experimental analyses employed in the study of politics. We are extremely excited…
Saying versus doing: A new donation method for measuring ideal points
Public Voting and Prosocial Behavior
One argument against secret ballots is that such procedures lead to more selfish voting behavior and that public voting can increase prosocial voting and the likelihood of prosocial outcomes when voters are not subject to intimidation and coercion from outside interests. We investigate this supposition as well as voter preferences over observability in voting in this context. We find that voters are significantly more likely to choose unselfishly…
Social Groups and the Effectiveness of Protests
We present an informational theory of public protests, according to which public protests allow citizens to aggregate privately dispersed information and signal it to the policy maker. The model predicts that information sharing of signals within social groups can facilitate information aggregation when the social groups are sufficiently large even when it is not predicted with individual signals. We use experiments in the laboratory and on Amazo…
Negative campaigns, interpersonal trust, and prosocial behavior: The mediating effect of democratic experience
Run-off Elections in the Laboratory
We study experimentally the properties of the majority run-off system and compare them to those of plurality rule. Our focus is on Duverger’s famous prediction that the plurality rule leads to higher co-ordination of votes on a limited number of candidates than the majority run-off rule. We find strong co-ordination forces under both systems. However, as predicted by the theory, in some cases these forces are stronger under plurality. Despite the…
Political science (25 works) · Economics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Voting (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (10 works)