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Jonathan Woon

Biographic Data

ID4122647
NAMEJonathan Woon
GIVEN NAMESJonathan
FAMILY NAMEWoon
SIGNATUREWOON J
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Pittsburgh
ORCID0000-0002-2237-5001
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS24
TOTAL CITATIONS513
AUTHOR COUNT24
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2007
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX10
  • Getting it right: Communication, voting, and collective truth finding

    Open Access•Valeria Burdea, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•European Journal of Political…•2025•References: 35

    We conduct an experiment to examine how communication affects the accuracy of collective judgments in small groups evaluating the truth of politically relevant facts and statements. We find that communication improves the accuracy of the group when individuals are more likely to be wrong, but reduces it when individuals are more likely to be correct—a pattern that reveals how deliberation can both clarify and confuse. Communication influences not…

  • Does allowing private communication lead to less prosocial collective choice

    Open Access•Kira Pronin, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Social Choice and Welfare•2023

  • Electability salience can bias voting decisions

    Open Access•William Minozzi, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2023•Cited by: 1•References: 11

    “Electability” received considerable attention during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, with some critics claiming that the term was code for sexism. From a rational choice perspective, “electability” could affect voting in multiple ways, including via expected utility; previous scholarship suggests that many voters consider it as such. Yet this scholarship ignores the role that salience plays in decision making, and is silent on which sorts …

  • Discussion and Fairness in a Laboratory Voting Experiment

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Minsu Jang et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2023•References: 8

    We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether public discussion before a majority vote increases the saliency of minority interests and results in more egalitarian outcomes or whether voters use discussion to form majorities that benefit at the expense of minorities. When there are two alternatives, we find that public discussion increases the likelihood that individuals vote for equal allocations, but has little to no impact on the g…

  • Discussion and Fairness in a Laboratory Voting Experiment – Addendum

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Minsu Jang et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2023

    An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button

  • Online belief elicitation methods

    Open Access•Valeria Burdea, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Economic Psychology•2022•Cited by: 3•References: 59

  • Trump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sean Craig et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2020•Cited by: 3•References: 13

    Many commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to…

  • The Macro-dynamics of Partisan Advantage

    Open Access•Logan Dancey, Matthew Tarpey et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2019•Cited by: 3•References: 33

    How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that su…

  • The Value of Preregistration for Open and Credible Science: An Initiative from the Journal of Experimental Political Science

    Open Access•Kevin Arceneaux, Rick K Wilson et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2018•Cited by: 1

    In the interest of promoting open and reproducible science, the Journal of Experimental Political Science editorial team will pilot the pre-acceptance of preregistered reports. We note that the launch of this new submission option is a complement to, and does not replace, the option to submit other types of manuscripts. JEPS remains open to receiving and reviewing high quality manuscripts regardless of whether they are based on preregistered stud…

  • How Hard to Fight? Cross-Player Effects and Strategic Sophistication in an Asymmetric Contest Experiment

    Stephen Chaudoin, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 52

    Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetric prize values in a lottery contest game. We find support for some, but not all, of the game’s comp…

  • Primaries and Candidate Polarization: Behavioral Theory and Experimental Evidence

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Political Science Review•2018•Cited by: 12•References: 68

    Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter's position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have ab…

  • Competing Gridlock Models and Status Quo Policies

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Ian Palmer Cook•ARTICLE•Political Analysis•2015•Cited by: 15•References: 21

    Spatial theories of lawmaking predict that legislative productivity is increasing in the number of status quo policies that lie outside the gridlock interval, but because locations of status quo policies are difficult to measure, previous empirical tests of gridlock theories rely on an auxiliary assumption that the distribution of status quo points is fixed and uniform. This assumption is at odds with the theories being tested, as it ignores the …

  • Women Don't Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry

    Open Access•Kristin Kanthak, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2015•Cited by: 211•References: 62

    To study gender differences in candidate emergence, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which we control the incentives potential candidates face, manipulate features of the electoral environment, and measure beliefs and preferences. We find that men and women are equally likely to volunteer when the representative is chosen randomly, but that women are less likely to become candidates when the representative is chosen by an election. This diff…

  • An Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional Choice

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 19

    I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politici…

  • Delaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over Appropriations

    Sarah E Anderson, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Congress & the Presidency•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 20

    Delay is a common feature of appropriations politics. Although members of Congress and the president often decry lengthy delays in the passage of appropriations bills, we investigate whether such delays might confer strategic advantages, and if so, to whom. We draw from bargaining theory to understand how the relationship between the duration of negotiations and outcomes depends on the underlying distribution of bargaining power and the nature of…

  • Political Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional Appropriations

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sarah Anderson et al.•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2012•Cited by: 19•References: 40

    Although Congress passes spending bills every year, there is great variation in the amount of time it takes. Drawing from rational models of bargaining, we identify factors that systematically affect the duration of legislative bargaining in the appropriations process. Analysis of spending bills for fiscal years 1977 to 2009 shows that delays are shorter when the ideological distance between pairs of key players decreases and distributive content…

  • Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2012•Cited by: 45•References: 64

    Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because…

  • An Experimental Investigation of Electoral Delegation and the Provision of Public Goods

    Open Access•John R Hamman, John Hamman et al.•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2011•Cited by: 22•References: 70

    How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. H…

  • Issue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. Senate

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 24•References: 36

    This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator's level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost‐benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and polic…

  • Measuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939—2004

    Open Access•John Collins Pope, Jeremy C Pope et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 45•References: 18

    Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and…

  • Change We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama Presidency

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2009•Cited by: 3•References: 3

    Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes…

  • Bill Sponsorship in Congress: The Moderating Effect of Agenda Positions on Legislative Proposals

    Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 52•References: 40

    Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators' goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis of a formal game theoretic model provides rigorous ju…

  • Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

    Jonathan Woon, John Collins Pope et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 47•References: 41

    The data from Figure 1 come from a survey that we designed to measure citizens ’ perceptions of party unity on a set of issues corresponding to key congressional votes. Such perceptions are usually not covered in traditional surveys. The data were collected as part of the 2006

  • Direct Democracy and the Selection of Representative Institutions: Voter Support for Apportionment Initiatives, 1924–62

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•State Politics & Policy Quarterly•2007•Cited by: 2•References: 25

    If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors …

  • Women Don't Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry

    Open Access•Kristin Kanthak, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2015•Cited by: 211•References: 62

    To study gender differences in candidate emergence, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which we control the incentives potential candidates face, manipulate features of the electoral environment, and measure beliefs and preferences. We find that men and women are equally likely to volunteer when the representative is chosen randomly, but that women are less likely to become candidates when the representative is chosen by an election. This diff…

  • Bill Sponsorship in Congress: The Moderating Effect of Agenda Positions on Legislative Proposals

    Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 52•References: 40

    Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators' goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis of a formal game theoretic model provides rigorous ju…

  • Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

    Jonathan Woon, John Collins Pope et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 47•References: 41

    The data from Figure 1 come from a survey that we designed to measure citizens ’ perceptions of party unity on a set of issues corresponding to key congressional votes. Such perceptions are usually not covered in traditional surveys. The data were collected as part of the 2006

  • Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2012•Cited by: 45•References: 64

    Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because…

  • Measuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939—2004

    Open Access•John Collins Pope, Jeremy C Pope et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 45•References: 18

    Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and…

  • Issue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. Senate

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 24•References: 36

    This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator's level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost‐benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and polic…

  • An Experimental Investigation of Electoral Delegation and the Provision of Public Goods

    Open Access•John R Hamman, John Hamman et al.•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2011•Cited by: 22•References: 70

    How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. H…

  • Political Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional Appropriations

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sarah Anderson et al.•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2012•Cited by: 19•References: 40

    Although Congress passes spending bills every year, there is great variation in the amount of time it takes. Drawing from rational models of bargaining, we identify factors that systematically affect the duration of legislative bargaining in the appropriations process. Analysis of spending bills for fiscal years 1977 to 2009 shows that delays are shorter when the ideological distance between pairs of key players decreases and distributive content…

  • Competing Gridlock Models and Status Quo Policies

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Ian Palmer Cook•ARTICLE•Political Analysis•2015•Cited by: 15•References: 21

    Spatial theories of lawmaking predict that legislative productivity is increasing in the number of status quo policies that lie outside the gridlock interval, but because locations of status quo policies are difficult to measure, previous empirical tests of gridlock theories rely on an auxiliary assumption that the distribution of status quo points is fixed and uniform. This assumption is at odds with the theories being tested, as it ignores the …

  • Primaries and Candidate Polarization: Behavioral Theory and Experimental Evidence

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Political Science Review•2018•Cited by: 12•References: 68

    Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter's position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have ab…

  • Online belief elicitation methods

    Open Access•Valeria Burdea, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Economic Psychology•2022•Cited by: 3•References: 59

  • Trump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sean Craig et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2020•Cited by: 3•References: 13

    Many commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to…

  • The Macro-dynamics of Partisan Advantage

    Open Access•Logan Dancey, Matthew Tarpey et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2019•Cited by: 3•References: 33

    How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that su…

  • How Hard to Fight? Cross-Player Effects and Strategic Sophistication in an Asymmetric Contest Experiment

    Stephen Chaudoin, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 52

    Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetric prize values in a lottery contest game. We find support for some, but not all, of the game’s comp…

  • Change We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama Presidency

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2009•Cited by: 3•References: 3

    Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes…

  • Direct Democracy and the Selection of Representative Institutions: Voter Support for Apportionment Initiatives, 1924–62

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•State Politics & Policy Quarterly•2007•Cited by: 2•References: 25

    If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors …

  • Electability salience can bias voting decisions

    Open Access•William Minozzi, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2023•Cited by: 1•References: 11

    “Electability” received considerable attention during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, with some critics claiming that the term was code for sexism. From a rational choice perspective, “electability” could affect voting in multiple ways, including via expected utility; previous scholarship suggests that many voters consider it as such. Yet this scholarship ignores the role that salience plays in decision making, and is silent on which sorts …

  • The Value of Preregistration for Open and Credible Science: An Initiative from the Journal of Experimental Political Science

    Open Access•Kevin Arceneaux, Rick K Wilson et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2018•Cited by: 1

    In the interest of promoting open and reproducible science, the Journal of Experimental Political Science editorial team will pilot the pre-acceptance of preregistered reports. We note that the launch of this new submission option is a complement to, and does not replace, the option to submit other types of manuscripts. JEPS remains open to receiving and reviewing high quality manuscripts regardless of whether they are based on preregistered stud…

  • An Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional Choice

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 19

    I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politici…

  • Delaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over Appropriations

    Sarah E Anderson, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Congress & the Presidency•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 20

    Delay is a common feature of appropriations politics. Although members of Congress and the president often decry lengthy delays in the passage of appropriations bills, we investigate whether such delays might confer strategic advantages, and if so, to whom. We draw from bargaining theory to understand how the relationship between the duration of negotiations and outcomes depends on the underlying distribution of bargaining power and the nature of…

  • Direct Democracy and the Selection of Representative Institutions: Voter Support for Apportionment Initiatives, 1924–62

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•State Politics & Policy Quarterly•2007•Cited by: 2•References: 25

    If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors …

  • Bill Sponsorship in Congress: The Moderating Effect of Agenda Positions on Legislative Proposals

    Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 52•References: 40

    Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators' goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis of a formal game theoretic model provides rigorous ju…

  • Made in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand Names

    Jonathan Woon, John Collins Pope et al.•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2008•Cited by: 47•References: 41

    The data from Figure 1 come from a survey that we designed to measure citizens ’ perceptions of party unity on a set of issues corresponding to key congressional votes. Such perceptions are usually not covered in traditional surveys. The data were collected as part of the 2006

  • Issue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. Senate

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 24•References: 36

    This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator's level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost‐benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and polic…

  • Measuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939—2004

    Open Access•John Collins Pope, Jeremy C Pope et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2009•Cited by: 45•References: 18

    Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and…

  • Change We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama Presidency

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2009•Cited by: 3•References: 3

    Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes…

  • An Experimental Investigation of Electoral Delegation and the Provision of Public Goods

    Open Access•John R Hamman, John Hamman et al.•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2011•Cited by: 22•References: 70

    How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. H…

  • Political Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional Appropriations

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sarah Anderson et al.•ARTICLE•Legislative Studies Quarterly•2012•Cited by: 19•References: 40

    Although Congress passes spending bills every year, there is great variation in the amount of time it takes. Drawing from rational models of bargaining, we identify factors that systematically affect the duration of legislative bargaining in the appropriations process. Analysis of spending bills for fiscal years 1977 to 2009 shows that delays are shorter when the ideological distance between pairs of key players decreases and distributive content…

  • Democratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory Experiment

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2012•Cited by: 45•References: 64

    Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward‐looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because…

  • An Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional Choice

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 19

    I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politici…

  • Delaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over Appropriations

    Sarah E Anderson, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Congress & the Presidency•2014•Cited by: 1•References: 20

    Delay is a common feature of appropriations politics. Although members of Congress and the president often decry lengthy delays in the passage of appropriations bills, we investigate whether such delays might confer strategic advantages, and if so, to whom. We draw from bargaining theory to understand how the relationship between the duration of negotiations and outcomes depends on the underlying distribution of bargaining power and the nature of…

  • Competing Gridlock Models and Status Quo Policies

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Ian Palmer Cook•ARTICLE•Political Analysis•2015•Cited by: 15•References: 21

    Spatial theories of lawmaking predict that legislative productivity is increasing in the number of status quo policies that lie outside the gridlock interval, but because locations of status quo policies are difficult to measure, previous empirical tests of gridlock theories rely on an auxiliary assumption that the distribution of status quo points is fixed and uniform. This assumption is at odds with the theories being tested, as it ignores the …

  • Women Don't Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry

    Open Access•Kristin Kanthak, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Journal of Political…•2015•Cited by: 211•References: 62

    To study gender differences in candidate emergence, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which we control the incentives potential candidates face, manipulate features of the electoral environment, and measure beliefs and preferences. We find that men and women are equally likely to volunteer when the representative is chosen randomly, but that women are less likely to become candidates when the representative is chosen by an election. This diff…

  • The Value of Preregistration for Open and Credible Science: An Initiative from the Journal of Experimental Political Science

    Open Access•Kevin Arceneaux, Rick K Wilson et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2018•Cited by: 1

    In the interest of promoting open and reproducible science, the Journal of Experimental Political Science editorial team will pilot the pre-acceptance of preregistered reports. We note that the launch of this new submission option is a complement to, and does not replace, the option to submit other types of manuscripts. JEPS remains open to receiving and reviewing high quality manuscripts regardless of whether they are based on preregistered stud…

  • How Hard to Fight? Cross-Player Effects and Strategic Sophistication in an Asymmetric Contest Experiment

    Stephen Chaudoin, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•The Journal of Politics•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 52

    Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetric prize values in a lottery contest game. We find support for some, but not all, of the game’s comp…

  • Primaries and Candidate Polarization: Behavioral Theory and Experimental Evidence

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•American Political Science Review•2018•Cited by: 12•References: 68

    Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter's position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have ab…

  • The Macro-dynamics of Partisan Advantage

    Open Access•Logan Dancey, Matthew Tarpey et al.•ARTICLE•Political Research Quarterly•2019•Cited by: 3•References: 33

    How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that su…

  • Trump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Sean Craig et al.•ARTICLE•PS Political Science & Politics•2020•Cited by: 3•References: 13

    Many commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to…

  • Online belief elicitation methods

    Open Access•Valeria Burdea, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Journal of Economic Psychology•2022•Cited by: 3•References: 59

  • Does allowing private communication lead to less prosocial collective choice

    Open Access•Kira Pronin, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Social Choice and Welfare•2023

  • Electability salience can bias voting decisions

    Open Access•William Minozzi, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•Research & Politics•2023•Cited by: 1•References: 11

    “Electability” received considerable attention during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, with some critics claiming that the term was code for sexism. From a rational choice perspective, “electability” could affect voting in multiple ways, including via expected utility; previous scholarship suggests that many voters consider it as such. Yet this scholarship ignores the role that salience plays in decision making, and is silent on which sorts …

  • Discussion and Fairness in a Laboratory Voting Experiment

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Minsu Jang et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2023•References: 8

    We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether public discussion before a majority vote increases the saliency of minority interests and results in more egalitarian outcomes or whether voters use discussion to form majorities that benefit at the expense of minorities. When there are two alternatives, we find that public discussion increases the likelihood that individuals vote for equal allocations, but has little to no impact on the g…

  • Discussion and Fairness in a Laboratory Voting Experiment – Addendum

    Open Access•Jonathan Woon, Minsu Jang et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Experimental Political…•2023

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  • Getting it right: Communication, voting, and collective truth finding

    Open Access•Valeria Burdea, Jonathan Woon•ARTICLE•European Journal of Political…•2025•References: 35

    We conduct an experiment to examine how communication affects the accuracy of collective judgments in small groups evaluating the truth of politically relevant facts and statements. We find that communication improves the accuracy of the group when individuals are more likely to be wrong, but reduces it when individuals are more likely to be correct—a pattern that reveals how deliberation can both clarify and confuse. Communication influences not…

Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Economics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (16 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Microeconomics (8 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (8 works)

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