Seth J Hill
Biographic Data
| ID | 1155092 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seth J Hill |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seth J |
| FAMILY NAME | Hill |
| SIGNATURE | HILL S J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3785-1533 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 958 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Do Emotional Ads Persuade? Evidence from Real-Time Campaign Advertising Experiments
We evaluate whether campaign advertisements that generate larger emotional reactions also generate larger persuasive effects in contemporary elections. We analyze 29 weeks of experiments conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, in which 48 authentic campaign ads were tested in real time, often within days of their debut. The ads and a placebo were randomly assigned to approximately 28,000 subjects. We find that campaign ads reliably …
Can Public Information Campaigns Restore Trust in American Elections Across Polarized State and Party Lines?
The Constitution empowers states to manage elections, yet this aspect of federalism poses formidable challenges with overlapping geographic and partisan divisions. We first provide descriptive evidence that, even though nonpartisan election officials use similar methods to protect ballot-counting across the country, Republican voters nationwide report low levels of trust in the elections run by the blue state of California, just as Democrats are …
How Research–Practice Partnerships Can Strengthen Experiments Designed to Build Trust in American Elections
To address the challenge of declining trust in American democracy in the wake of the 2020 presidential contest, election officials across the nation have undertaken innovative public information campaigns. Academic studies demonstrate that exposure to these messages can increase public confidence but do not show which types of messages are most effective. We report a set of three experimental studies that harness research–practice partnerships wi…
Efficacy of Congressional Oversight
Oversight, scholars argue, allows Congress to control the executive agents it empowers to implement law. Yet the tools of oversight are rather limited and debate continues as to how much influence oversight provides. How well can members of Congress motivate bureaucratic performance? To measure the efficacy of oversight, we create a new dataset matching oversight efforts to a bureaucratic deficiency Congress has sought to reduce since the early 2…
Acquiescence Bias Inflates Estimates of Conspiratorial Beliefs and Political Misperceptions - Corrigendum
Can Official Messaging on Trust in Elections Break Through Partisan Polarization
Partisan actors in the US have recently politicized trust in elections. In combination with partisan polarization, politicized election administration could undermine the peaceful transfer of power following elections. Can messaging about trust in elections break through partisan polarization? Partnering with election officials from Los Angeles County, Colorado, Georgia, and Texas, we conducted messaging experiments with nearly 8,500 Americans fo…
Response to Kirby Goidel, Nicholas T. Davis, and Keith Gaddie’s Review of Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want
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Emotional Reactions toCovid‐19 Projections and Consequences for Protective Policies and Personal Behavior
How does the public react to information about the likely progression of COVID‐19 cases in the United States? How do these reactions vary over the course of the pandemic and by partisanship, and with what consequences for policy attitudes and personal behavior? We argue that reading projections about the peak of COVID‐19 cases in the United States is likely to lead to increased levels of anxiety and sadness. We expect that these effects will be m…
Acquiescence Bias Inflates Estimates of Conspiratorial Beliefs and Political Misperceptions
Scholars, pundits, and politicians use opinion surveys to study citizen beliefs about political facts, such as the current unemployment rate, and more conspiratorial beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama was born abroad. Many studies, however, ignore acquiescence-response bias, the tendency for survey respondents to endorse any assertion made in a survey question regardless of content. With new surveys fielding questions asked in recent scholarsh…
How Do General Election Incentives Affect the Visible and Invisible Primary
Previous research finds that nominating more centrist candidates increases vote share and win probability in congressional general elections. Yet party primary elections often nominate non‐centrist candidates, increasing polarization between the American parties. We develop a model of choice in nomination politics that shows when and how actors respond to incentives of the general election. We then combine 200 million contribution records with da…
Moderates
Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or hol…
Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want
Democratic elections do not always deliver what majorities want. Many conclude from frustrated majorities a failure of democracy. This book argues the opposite may be true – that politicians who represent their constituents sometimes frustrate majorities. A theory of issue intensity explains how the intensity with which different voters care about political issues drives key features of elections, political participation, representation, and publ…
Can Addressing Integrity Concerns about Mail Balloting Increase Turnout? Results from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in the 2020 Presidential Election
The 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased…
A Theory of Intensity, Electoral Competition, and Costly Political Action
Individuals vary in how intensely they care about political outcomes. Despite attention to intensity in studies of representation and public opinion, the study of elections has paid less attention to the strategic dynamics of intensity. I present a theory that brings intensity to electoral competition. I investigate the preelection actions of voters and the response of candidates through a game-theoretic model. Because intensity is unobserved and…
How do Americans want elections to be run during the Covid-19 crisis
To inform the vital conversation among the nation’s political leaders, elections administrators, and scholars about how to hold a safe, accessible, and fair election in November 2020, this article reports how a sample of 5612 eligible American voters, surveyed 8–10 April, wanted to see the election run during the COVID-19 crisis. We embedded a randomized experiment presenting respondents with truthful summaries of the projections of two teams of …
Experimental Measurement of Misperception in Political Beliefs
Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, w…
The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments
Campaign persuasion operates with notable consistency across political parties, message tone, and information environment.
Sidestepping primary reform: Political Action in Response to Institutional Change
Many believe primary elections distort representation in American legislatures because unrepresentative actors nominate extremist candidates. Advocates have reformed primaries to broaden voter participation and increase representation. Empirical evidence, however, is quite variable on the effects of reform. I argue that when institutional reform narrows one pathway of political influence, aggrieved actors take political action elsewhere to circum…
Following Through on an Intention to Vote: Present Bias and Turnout
Many citizens express an intention to vote but then fail to follow through on their motivation. It is well known that impulsiveness contributes to unsound behaviors with adverse individual consequences like smoking, overeating, and undersaving. I apply these findings and theory to political participation and argue that present bias is also likely to limit collective behaviors. Those who desire to act are challenged by impulsiveness in following t…
On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes
Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity…
Southern realignment, party sorting, and the polarization of American primary electorates, 1958–2012
Learning Together Slowly: Bayesian Learning about Political Facts
Although many studies suggest that voters learn about political facts with prejudice toward their preexisting beliefs, none have fully characterized all inputs to Bayes’ Rule, leaving uncertainty about the magnitude of bias. This paper evaluates political learning by first highlighting the importance of careful measures of each input and then presenting a statistical model and experiment that measure the magnitude of departure from Bayesian learn…
Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate: Results from Merged Survey and Administrative Records
Changing votes or changing voters? How candidates and election context swing voters and mobilize the base
Turning Out Unlikely Voters? A Field Experiment in the Top-Two Primary
Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics
Partisanship seems to affect factual beliefs about politics. For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Reagan. We investigate whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize another. We develop a model of partisan survey response and re…
Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters' Limitations in Controlling Incumbents
Are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In thre…
Legislative Malfeasance and Political Accountability
Utilizing a unique data set from the Italian Ministry of Justice reporting the transmission to the Chamber of Deputies of more than the thousand requests for the removal of parliamentary immunity from deputies suspected of criminal wrongdoing, the authors analyze the political careers of members of the Chamber during the first eleven postwar legislatures (1948–94). They find that judicial investigation typically did not discourage deputies from s…
How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication
Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential…
A Disconnect in Representation? Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization
While it is widely agreed that Congress has polarized over the past 40 years, there is consider-able disagreement about the extent of public polarization and its connection to congressional polarization. We present the first estimation of time series of polarization using the same method on the most comprehensive data for both the public and the Senate. With statistics of various definitions of polarization, we find little increase in the dispers…
Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate: Results from Merged Survey and Administrative Records
Learning Together Slowly: Bayesian Learning about Political Facts
Although many studies suggest that voters learn about political facts with prejudice toward their preexisting beliefs, none have fully characterized all inputs to Bayes’ Rule, leaving uncertainty about the magnitude of bias. This paper evaluates political learning by first highlighting the importance of careful measures of each input and then presenting a statistical model and experiment that measure the magnitude of departure from Bayesian learn…
Moderates
Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or hol…
Identifying the Effect of All-Mail Elections on Turnout: Staggered Reform in the Evergreen State
What effect does moving to all-mail elections have on participation? On one hand, all registered voters automatically receive a ballot to return by mail at their convenience. On the other hand, the social aspect of the polling place, and the focal point of election day, is lost. Current estimates of the effect of all-mail elections on turnout are ambiguous. This article offers an improved design and new estimates of the effect of moving to all-ma…
Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes: Is the Face-Vote Correlation Caused by Candidate Selection
We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces. We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. C…
On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes
Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity…
Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment
Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protecti…
Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates
Many hypothesize that the divergence between Democratic and Republican members of Congress is partly attributable to partisan primary elections. Yet most empirical evidence on the influence of primary elections finds small to no effect on member behavior. I argue that existing designs that compare members elected out of nomination systems with more open rules of access to members elected out of more closed systems rest on the crucial and untested…
Changing votes or changing voters? How candidates and election context swing voters and mobilize the base
Acquiescence Bias Inflates Estimates of Conspiratorial Beliefs and Political Misperceptions
Scholars, pundits, and politicians use opinion surveys to study citizen beliefs about political facts, such as the current unemployment rate, and more conspiratorial beliefs, such as whether Barack Obama was born abroad. Many studies, however, ignore acquiescence-response bias, the tendency for survey respondents to endorse any assertion made in a survey question regardless of content. With new surveys fielding questions asked in recent scholarsh…
Turning Out Unlikely Voters? A Field Experiment in the Top-Two Primary
Experimental Measurement of Misperception in Political Beliefs
Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, w…
How do Americans want elections to be run during the Covid-19 crisis
To inform the vital conversation among the nation’s political leaders, elections administrators, and scholars about how to hold a safe, accessible, and fair election in November 2020, this article reports how a sample of 5612 eligible American voters, surveyed 8–10 April, wanted to see the election run during the COVID-19 crisis. We embedded a randomized experiment presenting respondents with truthful summaries of the projections of two teams of …
Following Through on an Intention to Vote: Present Bias and Turnout
Many citizens express an intention to vote but then fail to follow through on their motivation. It is well known that impulsiveness contributes to unsound behaviors with adverse individual consequences like smoking, overeating, and undersaving. I apply these findings and theory to political participation and argue that present bias is also likely to limit collective behaviors. Those who desire to act are challenged by impulsiveness in following t…
Southern realignment, party sorting, and the polarization of American primary electorates, 1958–2012
A behavioral measure of the enthusiasm gap in American elections
Who Wants to Discuss Vote Choices with Others? Polarization in Preferences for Deliberation
Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one's choices with others or to treat the…
How Do General Election Incentives Affect the Visible and Invisible Primary
Previous research finds that nominating more centrist candidates increases vote share and win probability in congressional general elections. Yet party primary elections often nominate non‐centrist candidates, increasing polarization between the American parties. We develop a model of choice in nomination politics that shows when and how actors respond to incentives of the general election. We then combine 200 million contribution records with da…
Sidestepping primary reform: Political Action in Response to Institutional Change
Many believe primary elections distort representation in American legislatures because unrepresentative actors nominate extremist candidates. Advocates have reformed primaries to broaden voter participation and increase representation. Empirical evidence, however, is quite variable on the effects of reform. I argue that when institutional reform narrows one pathway of political influence, aggrieved actors take political action elsewhere to circum…
Can Addressing Integrity Concerns about Mail Balloting Increase Turnout? Results from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in the 2020 Presidential Election
The 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased…
Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes: Is the Face-Vote Correlation Caused by Candidate Selection
We estimate the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice in congressional elections using an original survey instrument. Based on estimates of the facial competence of 972 congressional candidates, we show that in more competitive races the out-party tends to run candidates with higher quality faces. We estimate the direct effect of face on vote choice when controlling for the competitiveness of the contest and for individual partisanship. C…
Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes: Is the Face-Vote Correlation Caused by Candidate Selection
Legislative Malfeasance and Political Accountability
Utilizing a unique data set from the Italian Ministry of Justice reporting the transmission to the Chamber of Deputies of more than the thousand requests for the removal of parliamentary immunity from deputies suspected of criminal wrongdoing, the authors analyze the political careers of members of the Chamber during the first eleven postwar legislatures (1948–94). They find that judicial investigation typically did not discourage deputies from s…
Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters' Limitations in Controlling Incumbents
Are citizens competent to assess the performance of incumbent politicians? Observational studies cast doubt on voter competence by documenting several biases in retrospective assessments of performance. However, these studies are open to alternative interpretations because of the complexity of the real world. In this article, we show that these biases in retrospective evaluations occur even in the simplified setting of experimental games. In thre…
Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics
Partisanship seems to affect factual beliefs about politics. For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that the deficit rose during the Clinton administration; Democrats are more likely to say that inflation rose under Reagan. We investigate whether such patterns reflect differing beliefs among partisans or instead reflect a desire to praise one party or criticize another. We develop a model of partisan survey response and re…
Who Wants to Discuss Vote Choices with Others? Polarization in Preferences for Deliberation
Should people discuss their vote choices with others? On one hand, many people argue that openly deliberating with others can lead to better decision-making. On the other hand, institutions like the secret ballot imply that keeping these choices secret has value, perhaps as a means of insulating people from unwanted social pressures. This paper examines public attitudes about whether it is best to discuss one's choices with others or to treat the…
Identifying the Effect of All-Mail Elections on Turnout: Staggered Reform in the Evergreen State
What effect does moving to all-mail elections have on participation? On one hand, all registered voters automatically receive a ballot to return by mail at their convenience. On the other hand, the social aspect of the polling place, and the focal point of election day, is lost. Current estimates of the effect of all-mail elections on turnout are ambiguous. This article offers an improved design and new estimates of the effect of moving to all-ma…
How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication
Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential…
Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment
Although the secret ballot has been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we mailed information about protecti…
A behavioral measure of the enthusiasm gap in American elections
Institution of Nomination and the Policy Ideology of Primary Electorates
Many hypothesize that the divergence between Democratic and Republican members of Congress is partly attributable to partisan primary elections. Yet most empirical evidence on the influence of primary elections finds small to no effect on member behavior. I argue that existing designs that compare members elected out of nomination systems with more open rules of access to members elected out of more closed systems rest on the crucial and untested…
A Disconnect in Representation? Comparison of Trends in Congressional and Public Polarization
While it is widely agreed that Congress has polarized over the past 40 years, there is consider-able disagreement about the extent of public polarization and its connection to congressional polarization. We present the first estimation of time series of polarization using the same method on the most comprehensive data for both the public and the Senate. With statistics of various definitions of polarization, we find little increase in the dispers…
Turning Out Unlikely Voters? A Field Experiment in the Top-Two Primary
Learning Together Slowly: Bayesian Learning about Political Facts
Although many studies suggest that voters learn about political facts with prejudice toward their preexisting beliefs, none have fully characterized all inputs to Bayes’ Rule, leaving uncertainty about the magnitude of bias. This paper evaluates political learning by first highlighting the importance of careful measures of each input and then presenting a statistical model and experiment that measure the magnitude of departure from Bayesian learn…
Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate: Results from Merged Survey and Administrative Records
Changing votes or changing voters? How candidates and election context swing voters and mobilize the base
Southern realignment, party sorting, and the polarization of American primary electorates, 1958–2012
On the Meaning of Survey Reports of Roll‐Call “Votes
Contemporary efforts to evaluate representation often compare survey measures of how citizens say they would vote on legislation to what elected officials do in office. These comparisons generally suggest poor representation. We argue here that this common design is unlikely to effectively evaluate representation because responses to survey questions differ in important aspects from voting in legislatures. Measurement error and construct validity…
The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments
Campaign persuasion operates with notable consistency across political parties, message tone, and information environment.
Sidestepping primary reform: Political Action in Response to Institutional Change
Many believe primary elections distort representation in American legislatures because unrepresentative actors nominate extremist candidates. Advocates have reformed primaries to broaden voter participation and increase representation. Empirical evidence, however, is quite variable on the effects of reform. I argue that when institutional reform narrows one pathway of political influence, aggrieved actors take political action elsewhere to circum…
Following Through on an Intention to Vote: Present Bias and Turnout
Many citizens express an intention to vote but then fail to follow through on their motivation. It is well known that impulsiveness contributes to unsound behaviors with adverse individual consequences like smoking, overeating, and undersaving. I apply these findings and theory to political participation and argue that present bias is also likely to limit collective behaviors. Those who desire to act are challenged by impulsiveness in following t…
How do Americans want elections to be run during the Covid-19 crisis
To inform the vital conversation among the nation’s political leaders, elections administrators, and scholars about how to hold a safe, accessible, and fair election in November 2020, this article reports how a sample of 5612 eligible American voters, surveyed 8–10 April, wanted to see the election run during the COVID-19 crisis. We embedded a randomized experiment presenting respondents with truthful summaries of the projections of two teams of …
Experimental Measurement of Misperception in Political Beliefs
Recent research suggests widespread misperception about the political views of others. Measuring perceptions often relies on instruments that do not separate uncertainty from inaccuracy. We present new experimental measures of second-order political beliefs. To carefully measure political (mis)perceptions, we have subjects report beliefs as probabilities. To encourage accuracy, we provide micro-incentives for each response. To measure learning, w…
Frustrated Majorities: How Issue Intensity Enables Smaller Groups of Voters to Get What They Want
Democratic elections do not always deliver what majorities want. Many conclude from frustrated majorities a failure of democracy. This book argues the opposite may be true – that politicians who represent their constituents sometimes frustrate majorities. A theory of issue intensity explains how the intensity with which different voters care about political issues drives key features of elections, political participation, representation, and publ…
Can Addressing Integrity Concerns about Mail Balloting Increase Turnout? Results from a Large-Scale Field Experiment in the 2020 Presidential Election
The 2020 presidential election brought expanded vote-by-mail opportunities, a rise in attacks on this process’s integrity, and the implementation of novel programs such as California’s Where’s My Ballot? system to ensure confidence in mail balloting. Can heightening awareness of this ballot-tracking system and other election protections alleviate fraud concerns and raise turnout? We assess whether messages reinforcing election integrity increased…
Political science (32 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (29 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (24 works) · Economics (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Voting (16 works) · Media Influence and Politics (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works)