Benjamin Highton
Biographic Data
| ID | 4122703 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Highton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Highton |
| SIGNATURE | HIGHTON B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8021-7426 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1117 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Uniform Punishment and Conditional Reward: Ideological Extremism and Senatorial Approval in the United States
Do constituents hold elected officials accountable for their ideological positions? Using over 1 million Senatorial evaluations from the 2006–2024 Cooperative Election Study, we employ a within‐respondent design that exploits the fact that each constituent evaluates two Senators, absorbing unmeasured respondent characteristics. We find “uniform punishment, conditional reward”: outpartisan constituents penalize extremism by roughly 14 percentage p…
Extending the Referendum Model of Presidential Election Outcomes: Both Candidates Matter”
We offer a candidate-centered amendment to incumbent-referendum models of presidential election outcomes that dominate the literature on post-WWII presidential elections. Our argument is that incumbent-challenger differences in character qualifications and issue concerns of the electorate should be included. These differentials, which recognize the advantage or disadvantage of the incumbent relative to the challenger party candidate have strong e…
The Policy Polarization of Party Activists in the United States
This article investigates how a key stratum of the partisan elite—party activists—have been positioned across time and policy issues. We examine the extent to which activists have polarized symmetrically or asymmetrically and find that only on the issue of abortion has one party’s activists (Republicans) polarized notably more than the other’s. The article also analyzes party activist proximity to the mass public’s policy preferences and finds th…
Reconciling Candidate Extremism and Spatial Voting
We propose a modified spatial‐voting rule to explain why congressional candidates adopt more extreme ideological positions than their constituents' preferences. Our model accepts the standard spatial‐voting model with one critical exception: voters in the same party as a candidate tolerate extremism without imposing an electoral penalty. This, in turn, creates “leeway” for candidates to adopt extreme positions as they increasingly depend on voter…
The Cultural Realignment of State White Electorates in the 21st Century
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account …
Issue Accountability in U.S. House Elections
Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States
This article analyzes voter identification laws in the United States and their effects on voter turnout. Theoretically, there are plausible reasons to hypothesize turnout lowering effects, though there are also reasons to hypothesize those effects might be minimal. Methodologically, there are research design hurdles to clear in order to produce effect estimates that may be attributed to voter identification laws. Empirically, a small number of st…
Assessing the Mechanisms of Senatorial Responsiveness to Constituency Preferences
This article analyzes the relationship between U.S. senators and their constituencies over the entire period of time that senators have been selected by direct election. Focusing on preference change within states, we identify three mechanisms that might produce responsiveness in senators’ ideological locations. We find that it is not merely the case that responsiveness is produced by party representation. Replacement of one senator with another …
Voting: Turnout
In Memoriam
of Chicago, where he studied
Evaluations of the 2014 Midterm Election Forecasts
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Constitutional Design and 2014 Senate Election Outcomes
A common observation about the 2014 Senate elections is that one advantage the Republicans had was that the set of states holding elections tilted Republican in partisanship. In this article, we quantify that advantage and demonstrate that the constitutional requirements of equality for state representation in the Senate plus the division of seats into three classes were critical elements in the Republicans’ pickup of nine seats and retaking part…
Election Fundamentals and Polls Favor the Republicans
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Sorting the American States into Red and Blue: Culture, Economics, and the 2012 US Presidential Election in Historical Context
This paper analyzes variation in presidential outcomes across the American states from 1972 through 2012. The findings show that differences in cultural policy preferences across the states are more important than economic preferences for explaining state outcomes in 2012. This result fits a long-term trend of the growing importance of cultural issues – absolutely and relative to economic issues – for sorting the states, which has had the effect …
How Does Multilevel Regression and Poststratification Perform with Conventional National Surveys
Multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) is a method to estimate public opinion across geographic units from individual-level survey data. If it works with samples the size of typical national surveys, then MRP offers the possibility of analyzing many political phenomena previously believed to be outside the bounds of systematic empirical inquiry. Initial investigations of its performance with conventional national samples produce gener…
Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation
Sniderman and Benjamin Highton 1 Part I: The Political Logic of Preference Consistency Chapter I. How Do Political Scientists Know What Citizens Want? An Essay on Theory and Measurement by Arthur Lupia 23 Chapter II. Purposive Mass Belief Systems concerning Foreign Policy Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie 47 Chapter III. Cosmopolitanism by Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck 70 Chapter IV. Running to the Right: Effects of Campaign Strategy on Mass Opinion …
Updating Political Evaluations: Policy Attitudes, Partisanship, and Presidential Assessments
The pervasive influence of partisanship on political evaluations is well known and understood. Whether citizens rely on their policy attitudes has received less attention, especially in the context of how people update and revise their evaluations. This paper focuses on presidential assessments and uses panel data covering three presidencies to model the determinants of opinion change. The results indicate that policy preferences (like partisansh…
Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation
Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer ne…
The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations
Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens' issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causa…
The influence of strategic retirement on the incumbency advantage in US House elections
Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). This paper identifies possible problems with the Cox and Katz (2002) method and develops a new approach based on simulating…
Prejudice Rivals Partisanship and Ideology When Explaining the 2008 Presidential Vote across the States
This article demonstrates that racial prejudice was strongly related to the state-level nonblack vote in the 2008 presidential election, which featured the first African American candidate from a major party, Barack Obama. Additional tests show that while prejudice also explains shifts in the nonblack vote between 2004 and 2008, its influence on voting in the 2000 and 2004 elections was modest at best. Furthermore, there is no relationship betwee…
The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections
This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substanti…
Revisiting the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Political Sophistication
In politics, those who are politically sophisticated are advantaged in a variety of ways relative to those who are not. This paper analyzes the causes of political sophistication paying particular attention to the variable most commonly identified as the primary cause of differences within the mass public, educational attainment. Using panel data first collected before some respondents attended college, I show that there appears to be no signific…
Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public
This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences …
The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of American elections is the low turnout of young people. Hypotheses purporting to explain this phenomenon focus on life-cycle transitions that define adulthood, like marriage or leaving school. For a variety of reasons that we explain, previous research has failed to test these propositions. We identify six such adult roles and estimate their effects on turnout of young citizens. We find that most of th…
Easy Registration and Voter Turnout
Registration requirements are often identified as factors that depress turnout in the United States In addition, it is alleged that they contribute to the "socioeconomic skew" of the voting population because the costs of registration have greater impact on the less educated In order to gain greater insight into the effects of registration, I analyze individual turnout in states which impose minimal or no registration costs on their residents, wh…
White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress
Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States
In a democracy, voting is the most fundamental act of political participation and therefore holds a central location in the study of political behavior. One significant research tradition focuses on the relationship between registration and turnout and raises important and related questions. How do registration laws influence turnout levels? What types of people are most affected by them? What are the partisan implications of registration require…
Revisiting the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Political Sophistication
In politics, those who are politically sophisticated are advantaged in a variety of ways relative to those who are not. This paper analyzes the causes of political sophistication paying particular attention to the variable most commonly identified as the primary cause of differences within the mass public, educational attainment. Using panel data first collected before some respondents attended college, I show that there appears to be no signific…
Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation
The Political Implications of Higher Turnout
Rich Americans, far more likely to vote than their poorer fellow citizens, also differ in how they vote and what policies they favour. These undisputed facts lead to the widespread belief 'that if everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.' The gist of this conclusion, which seems to follow ineluctably from our opening sentence, is accepted by almost everyone except a few empirical political scientists. The…
The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations
Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens' issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causa…
Beyond the Roll-Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress
Most analyses of position taking in Congress focus on roll-call voting, where members of Congress (MCs) regularly cast votes, thereby regularly taking positions. Left largely unstudied has been position taking beyond the domain of rollcall voting. However, analyzing non-roll-call position taking raises interesting theoretical questions. Whereas most members cannot avoid taking positions (casting votes) on roll calls, outside the roll-call arena M…
Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993
How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote
A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day…
How Does Multilevel Regression and Poststratification Perform with Conventional National Surveys
Multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) is a method to estimate public opinion across geographic units from individual-level survey data. If it works with samples the size of typical national surveys, then MRP offers the possibility of analyzing many political phenomena previously believed to be outside the bounds of systematic empirical inquiry. Initial investigations of its performance with conventional national samples produce gener…
Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States
This article analyzes voter identification laws in the United States and their effects on voter turnout. Theoretically, there are plausible reasons to hypothesize turnout lowering effects, though there are also reasons to hypothesize those effects might be minimal. Methodologically, there are research design hurdles to clear in order to produce effect estimates that may be attributed to voter identification laws. Empirically, a small number of st…
Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public
This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences …
New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States
In this article, we address a number of unresolved questions about Latino electoral participation. First, we examine differences between Latinos and other groups and establish a persistent pattern of low Latino turnout that remains even after taking into account the fact that a large proportion of Latinos are not citizens and are therefore ineligible to vote. Then we investigate the extent to which differences in turnout between Latinos and other…
Does Policy Debate Reduce Information Effects in Public Opinion? Analyzing the Evolution of Public Opinion on Health Care
Because most citizens fall short of the normative ideal of being politically knowledgeable, it is important to assess the nature of information effects in public opinion. This paper identifies policy debate as a means by which information effects may be reduced. To test this notion, we analyze public opinion on health care before, during, and after the heated policy debate of the 1990s. The results show that information effects in public opinion …
Senate Elections in the United States, 1920–94
Adopted in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution requires that members of the US Senate be elected by citizens of their respective states. This article is concerned with understanding what factors have influenced Senate election outcomes and how their effects have changed over time. I focus on three independent variables, state partisan composition, incumbency, and national partisan tides, and then develop a model of Senate election out…
Assessing the Relationship between Economic News Coverage and Mass Economic Attitudes
Do economic performance and economic news coverage influence public perceptions of the economy? Efforts to assess the effects are hampered by the interrelationships among the variables. In this paper, we bring to bear a more careful accounting of available economic variables than previous studies have used. We find that both media tone and economic attitudes are strongly related to actual economic performance. Moreover, after taking into account …
Prejudice Rivals Partisanship and Ideology When Explaining the 2008 Presidential Vote across the States
This article demonstrates that racial prejudice was strongly related to the state-level nonblack vote in the 2008 presidential election, which featured the first African American candidate from a major party, Barack Obama. Additional tests show that while prejudice also explains shifts in the nonblack vote between 2004 and 2008, its influence on voting in the 2000 and 2004 elections was modest at best. Furthermore, there is no relationship betwee…
Issue Accountability in U.S. House Elections
Long Lines, Voting Machine Availability, and Turnout: The Case of Franklin County, Ohio in the 2004 Presidential Election
Within polling places, does the scarcity of voting machines cause longer lines and thereby dissuade some people from voting? Are voting machines scarce in some areas because turnout would be low, irrespective of the availability of voting machines? In Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the answers to these questions carried very real and significant political stakes. Consider the following from Franklin County, the second mo…
Job Approval and Senate Election Outcomes In the United States
A growing body of congressional scholarship investigates variation in the incumbent electoral advantage that depends on factors such as competence, political skill, and ideological extremity. This article contributes to this line of work by providing analysis of the relationship between senators' home‐state approval ratings and their electoral fortunes using newly available data from the Job Approval Ratings (JAR) collection. The findings show th…
Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion
The influence of strategic retirement on the incumbency advantage in US House elections
Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). This paper identifies possible problems with the Cox and Katz (2002) method and develops a new approach based on simulating…
The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections
This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substanti…
Easy Registration and Voter Turnout
Registration requirements are often identified as factors that depress turnout in the United States In addition, it is alleged that they contribute to the "socioeconomic skew" of the voting population because the costs of registration have greater impact on the less educated In order to gain greater insight into the effects of registration, I analyze individual turnout in states which impose minimal or no registration costs on their residents, wh…
Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993
Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation
Senate Elections in the United States, 1920–94
Adopted in 1913, the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution requires that members of the US Senate be elected by citizens of their respective states. This article is concerned with understanding what factors have influenced Senate election outcomes and how their effects have changed over time. I focus on three independent variables, state partisan composition, incumbency, and national partisan tides, and then develop a model of Senate election out…
The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle
One of the most noteworthy characteristics of American elections is the low turnout of young people. Hypotheses purporting to explain this phenomenon focus on life-cycle transitions that define adulthood, like marriage or leaving school. For a variety of reasons that we explain, previous research has failed to test these propositions. We identify six such adult roles and estimate their effects on turnout of young citizens. We find that most of th…
The Political Implications of Higher Turnout
Rich Americans, far more likely to vote than their poorer fellow citizens, also differ in how they vote and what policies they favour. These undisputed facts lead to the widespread belief 'that if everybody in this country voted, the Democrats would be in for the next 100 years.' The gist of this conclusion, which seems to follow ineluctably from our opening sentence, is accepted by almost everyone except a few empirical political scientists. The…
Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 House Elections
Journal Article Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 House Elections Get access BENJAMIN HIGHTON BENJAMIN HIGHTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 1, March 2002, Pages 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1086/338410 Published: 01 March 2002
New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States
In this article, we address a number of unresolved questions about Latino electoral participation. First, we examine differences between Latinos and other groups and establish a persistent pattern of low Latino turnout that remains even after taking into account the fact that a large proportion of Latinos are not citizens and are therefore ineligible to vote. Then we investigate the extent to which differences in turnout between Latinos and other…
White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress
Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion
Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States
In a democracy, voting is the most fundamental act of political participation and therefore holds a central location in the study of political behavior. One significant research tradition focuses on the relationship between registration and turnout and raises important and related questions. How do registration laws influence turnout levels? What types of people are most affected by them? What are the partisan implications of registration require…
Beyond the Roll-Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress
How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote
A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day…
Beyond the Roll-Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress
Most analyses of position taking in Congress focus on roll-call voting, where members of Congress (MCs) regularly cast votes, thereby regularly taking positions. Left largely unstudied has been position taking beyond the domain of rollcall voting. However, analyzing non-roll-call position taking raises interesting theoretical questions. Whereas most members cannot avoid taking positions (casting votes) on roll calls, outside the roll-call arena M…
Does Policy Debate Reduce Information Effects in Public Opinion? Analyzing the Evolution of Public Opinion on Health Care
Because most citizens fall short of the normative ideal of being politically knowledgeable, it is important to assess the nature of information effects in public opinion. This paper identifies policy debate as a means by which information effects may be reduced. To test this notion, we analyze public opinion on health care before, during, and after the heated policy debate of the 1990s. The results show that information effects in public opinion …
Long Lines, Voting Machine Availability, and Turnout: The Case of Franklin County, Ohio in the 2004 Presidential Election
Within polling places, does the scarcity of voting machines cause longer lines and thereby dissuade some people from voting? Are voting machines scarce in some areas because turnout would be low, irrespective of the availability of voting machines? In Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the answers to these questions carried very real and significant political stakes. Consider the following from Franklin County, the second mo…
Job Approval and Senate Election Outcomes In the United States
A growing body of congressional scholarship investigates variation in the incumbent electoral advantage that depends on factors such as competence, political skill, and ideological extremity. This article contributes to this line of work by providing analysis of the relationship between senators' home‐state approval ratings and their electoral fortunes using newly available data from the Job Approval Ratings (JAR) collection. The findings show th…
Revisiting the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Political Sophistication
In politics, those who are politically sophisticated are advantaged in a variety of ways relative to those who are not. This paper analyzes the causes of political sophistication paying particular attention to the variable most commonly identified as the primary cause of differences within the mass public, educational attainment. Using panel data first collected before some respondents attended college, I show that there appears to be no signific…
Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public
This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences …
The Contextual Causes of Issue and Party Voting in American Presidential Elections
This paper analyzes the influence of the two most commonly examined causes of presidential vote choice, policy preferences and party identification. The focus is on change across elections in order to assess how the effects of issues and partisanship respond to the larger political context in which voters make their decisions. In contrast to party centric views of politics, I find little direct responsiveness to party issue contrast and substanti…
Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation
Citizens are political simpletons—that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature. This book brings together leading political scientists who offer ne…
The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations
Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens' issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causa…
The influence of strategic retirement on the incumbency advantage in US House elections
Failure to take into account ‘strategic retirement’ leads to inflated estimates of the incumbent electoral advantage. The one attempt to address this issue in the context of US House elections implies that much of the supposed incumbency advantage and most of its presumed increase over time are illusory (Cox and Katz, 2002). This paper identifies possible problems with the Cox and Katz (2002) method and develops a new approach based on simulating…
Prejudice Rivals Partisanship and Ideology When Explaining the 2008 Presidential Vote across the States
This article demonstrates that racial prejudice was strongly related to the state-level nonblack vote in the 2008 presidential election, which featured the first African American candidate from a major party, Barack Obama. Additional tests show that while prejudice also explains shifts in the nonblack vote between 2004 and 2008, its influence on voting in the 2000 and 2004 elections was modest at best. Furthermore, there is no relationship betwee…
Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation
Sniderman and Benjamin Highton 1 Part I: The Political Logic of Preference Consistency Chapter I. How Do Political Scientists Know What Citizens Want? An Essay on Theory and Measurement by Arthur Lupia 23 Chapter II. Purposive Mass Belief Systems concerning Foreign Policy Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie 47 Chapter III. Cosmopolitanism by Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck 70 Chapter IV. Running to the Right: Effects of Campaign Strategy on Mass Opinion …
Electoral Systems and Political Participation (40 works) · Political science (38 works) · Politics (34 works) · Law (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Economics (26 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Voting (19 works) · Public Administration (15 works)