E Hersh
Biographic Data
| ID | 55914 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Hersh |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Hersh |
| SIGNATURE | HERSH E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8826-5852 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 516 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Who Wants Stakeholder Capitalism? Public and Elite Perceptions of the Role of Business Leaders in Politics
On what policy areas and with what strategies should businesses and their leaders be involved in political activity? Advocates of “stakeholder capitalism” endorse companies and their leaders taking stances on social, environmental, and economic issues that advance the interests of their communities, not just of their shareholders. We juxtapose this view with two alternatives: companies and their leaders should a) stay out of politics or b) advoca…
The Partisan Realignment of American Business: Evidence from a Survey of Corporate Leaders
For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values, changes in trade policy, and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a coalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how businesses navigate two forms of organization…
Antisemitic Attitudes among Young Black and Hispanic Americans
Prior research has shown that racial minority groups are more likely than Whites to hold negative views of Jews. We discuss several theories that may explain this phenomenon, including group competition, anti-White attitudes manifesting as antisemitism, spillover from anti-Israel attitudes, and more. Some theories, especially those developed in the mid-20th century, may be less applicable today, particularly to young adults. Through an original s…
Public perceptions of local influence
Who do people think are influential in their own community? This question is important for understanding topics such as social networks, political party networks, civic engagement, and local politics. At the same time as research on these topics has grown, measurement of public perceptions of local influence has dried up. Years ago, researchers took active interest in the question of community influence. They found that most ordinary Americans co…
Introduction to Freedom of Expression in an Age of Social Media, Misinformation, and Political Polarization
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a “horseshoe theory” in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center. However, there is little quantitative research evaluating left-wing …
The Political Role of Business Leaders
What role do business leaders play in American democracy? The dominant narrative in political science holds that business leaders have disproportionate influence; this influence has increased over time; the public opposes business engagement in politics; and a reform agenda could counteract business influence. I contrast this narrative with a second narrative that also emerges from the literature: Business leaders are fragmented and fail to achie…
The Young American Left and Attitudes About Israel
The Politics of 130,000 American Religious Leaders: A New Methodological Approach
We compile an original database of 130,000 American clergy across 40 denominations, which we link to public voter registration data. We then link these data to mass surveys and a survey of pastors' own churches. This paper has two purposes. First, it introduces a new methodology for learning about religious communities by scraping information from denominational find-a-church websites . Second, the paper presents several short analyses that focus…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
Postmaterialist Particularism: What Petitions Can Tell Us About Biases in the Policy Agenda
Groups with financial resources dominate the pool of lobbyists and political donors. Scholars and reformers often point to the outsized influence of moneyed elites when they consider economic inequality that results from public policy. Here, we expand the scope of existing work by focusing attention on the types of policy proposals placed on the issue agenda in a venue where financial resources are not a prerequisite for participation—policy-orie…
Campaign Perceptions of Electoral Closeness: Uncertainty, Fear and Over-Confidence
In partnership with state Democratic parties and the Obama campaign, the authors surveyed staffers from nearly 200 electoral campaigns in 2012, asking about the expected vote share in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of closeness can affect how they campaign and represent citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: campaigns may irrationally fear close contests or be unrealistically optimistic. Findings indicate that p…
Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss
Reviewed by: Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracyby Daniel Kreiss Eitan D. Hersh (bio) Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. by Daniel Kreiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 306. $99/ $27.95. For a political party or campaign, figuring out what makes 200 million voters tick has always been a monumental task. The task is made easier—or maybe just made d…
The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income‐Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income‐based voting ac…
Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters
Hacking the Electorate is the most comprehensive study to date about the consequences of campaigns using microtargeting databases to mobilize voters in elections. Eitan Hersh follows the trail from data to strategy to outcomes. Hersh argues that most of what campaigns know about voters comes from a core set of public records. States vary in the kinds of records they collect from voters - and these variations in data across the country mean that c…
Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem
As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show…
Gender, Race, Age and Voting: A Research Note
In this brief analysis, we use a new dataset of two million voter registration records to demonstrate that gender, race, and age do not correlate with political participation in the ways that previous research has shown. Among Blacks and Latinos, women participate at vastly higher rates than men; many Blacks participate at higher rates than Whites; and the relationship between age and participation is both not linear and varies by race and gender…
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Movers, Stayers, and Registration: Why Age is Correlated with Registration in the U.S
Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of registering to vote at any given time and a constant probability of moving. A strong relationship between age and participation arises simply as a byproduct of…
Primary Voters Versus Caucus Goers and the Peripheral Motivations of Political Participation
Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate
Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improvements in public records, we conduct the first-ever fifty-state vote validation. We parse overreporting due to response bias from overreporting due to …
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate
Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improvements in public records, we conduct the first-ever fifty-state vote validation. We parse overreporting due to response bias from overreporting due to …
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem
As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show…
The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income‐Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income‐based voting ac…
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Movers, Stayers, and Registration: Why Age is Correlated with Registration in the U.S
Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of registering to vote at any given time and a constant probability of moving. A strong relationship between age and participation arises simply as a byproduct of…
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a “horseshoe theory” in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center. However, there is little quantitative research evaluating left-wing …
Campaign Perceptions of Electoral Closeness: Uncertainty, Fear and Over-Confidence
In partnership with state Democratic parties and the Obama campaign, the authors surveyed staffers from nearly 200 electoral campaigns in 2012, asking about the expected vote share in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of closeness can affect how they campaign and represent citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: campaigns may irrationally fear close contests or be unrealistically optimistic. Findings indicate that p…
The Political Role of Business Leaders
What role do business leaders play in American democracy? The dominant narrative in political science holds that business leaders have disproportionate influence; this influence has increased over time; the public opposes business engagement in politics; and a reform agenda could counteract business influence. I contrast this narrative with a second narrative that also emerges from the literature: Business leaders are fragmented and fail to achie…
The Politics of 130,000 American Religious Leaders: A New Methodological Approach
We compile an original database of 130,000 American clergy across 40 denominations, which we link to public voter registration data. We then link these data to mass surveys and a survey of pastors' own churches. This paper has two purposes. First, it introduces a new methodology for learning about religious communities by scraping information from denominational find-a-church websites . Second, the paper presents several short analyses that focus…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
Primary Voters Versus Caucus Goers and the Peripheral Motivations of Political Participation
Gender, Race, Age and Voting: A Research Note
In this brief analysis, we use a new dataset of two million voter registration records to demonstrate that gender, race, and age do not correlate with political participation in the ways that previous research has shown. Among Blacks and Latinos, women participate at vastly higher rates than men; many Blacks participate at higher rates than Whites; and the relationship between age and participation is both not linear and varies by race and gender…
Who Wants Stakeholder Capitalism? Public and Elite Perceptions of the Role of Business Leaders in Politics
On what policy areas and with what strategies should businesses and their leaders be involved in political activity? Advocates of “stakeholder capitalism” endorse companies and their leaders taking stances on social, environmental, and economic issues that advance the interests of their communities, not just of their shareholders. We juxtapose this view with two alternatives: companies and their leaders should a) stay out of politics or b) advoca…
The Partisan Realignment of American Business: Evidence from a Survey of Corporate Leaders
For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values, changes in trade policy, and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a coalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how businesses navigate two forms of organization…
Public perceptions of local influence
Who do people think are influential in their own community? This question is important for understanding topics such as social networks, political party networks, civic engagement, and local politics. At the same time as research on these topics has grown, measurement of public perceptions of local influence has dried up. Years ago, researchers took active interest in the question of community influence. They found that most ordinary Americans co…
Postmaterialist Particularism: What Petitions Can Tell Us About Biases in the Policy Agenda
Groups with financial resources dominate the pool of lobbyists and political donors. Scholars and reformers often point to the outsized influence of moneyed elites when they consider economic inequality that results from public policy. Here, we expand the scope of existing work by focusing attention on the types of policy proposals placed on the issue agenda in a venue where financial resources are not a prerequisite for participation—policy-orie…
Voting Costs and Voter Turnout in Competitive Elections
In the United States, competitive elections are often concentrated in particular places. These places attract disproportionate attention from news media and election campaigns. Yet many voting studies only test stimuli in uncompetitive environments, or only test for average effects, and simply assume the results are relevant to competitive contexts. This article questions that assumption by utilizing Election Day inclement weather as an exogenous…
Movers, Stayers, and Registration: Why Age is Correlated with Registration in the U.S
Age is among the strongest predictors of political participation, yet it is also among the least well understood. We offer a probability model of participation in the U.S. voter registration system — the first step in the voting process. In this model, people have a constant probability of registering to vote at any given time and a constant probability of moving. A strong relationship between age and participation arises simply as a byproduct of…
Primary Voters Versus Caucus Goers and the Peripheral Motivations of Political Participation
Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate
Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improvements in public records, we conduct the first-ever fifty-state vote validation. We parse overreporting due to response bias from overreporting due to …
Gender, Race, Age and Voting: A Research Note
In this brief analysis, we use a new dataset of two million voter registration records to demonstrate that gender, race, and age do not correlate with political participation in the ways that previous research has shown. Among Blacks and Latinos, women participate at vastly higher rates than men; many Blacks participate at higher rates than Whites; and the relationship between age and participation is both not linear and varies by race and gender…
Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity
Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to…
Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters
Hacking the Electorate is the most comprehensive study to date about the consequences of campaigns using microtargeting databases to mobilize voters in elections. Eitan Hersh follows the trail from data to strategy to outcomes. Hersh argues that most of what campaigns know about voters comes from a core set of public records. States vary in the kinds of records they collect from voters - and these variations in data across the country mean that c…
Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem
As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show…
The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income‐Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income‐based voting ac…
Campaign Perceptions of Electoral Closeness: Uncertainty, Fear and Over-Confidence
In partnership with state Democratic parties and the Obama campaign, the authors surveyed staffers from nearly 200 electoral campaigns in 2012, asking about the expected vote share in their races. Political operatives’ perceptions of closeness can affect how they campaign and represent citizens, but their perceptions may be wildly inaccurate: campaigns may irrationally fear close contests or be unrealistically optimistic. Findings indicate that p…
Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss
Reviewed by: Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracyby Daniel Kreiss Eitan D. Hersh (bio) Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. by Daniel Kreiss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 306. $99/ $27.95. For a political party or campaign, figuring out what makes 200 million voters tick has always been a monumental task. The task is made easier—or maybe just made d…
Are Americans Stuck in Uncompetitive Enclaves? An Appraisal of U.S. Electoral Competition
Most elections in the United States are not close, which has raised concerns among social scientists and reform advocates about the vibrancy of American democracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that while individual elections are often uncompetitive, hierarchical, temporal, and geographic variation in the locus of competition results in most of the country regularly experiencing close elections. In the four-cycle period between 2006 and 2012, 89%…
Obstacles to Estimating Voter ID Laws’ Effect on Turnout
Widespread concern that voter identification laws suppress turnout among racial and ethnic minorities has made empirical evaluations of these laws crucial. But problems with administrative records and survey data impede such evaluations. We replicate and extend Hajnal, Lajevardi, and Nielson's 2017 article, which concludes that voter ID laws decrease turnout among minorities, using validated turnout data from five national surveys conducted betwe…
Postmaterialist Particularism: What Petitions Can Tell Us About Biases in the Policy Agenda
Groups with financial resources dominate the pool of lobbyists and political donors. Scholars and reformers often point to the outsized influence of moneyed elites when they consider economic inequality that results from public policy. Here, we expand the scope of existing work by focusing attention on the types of policy proposals placed on the issue agenda in a venue where financial resources are not a prerequisite for participation—policy-orie…
The Politics of 130,000 American Religious Leaders: A New Methodological Approach
We compile an original database of 130,000 American clergy across 40 denominations, which we link to public voter registration data. We then link these data to mass surveys and a survey of pastors' own churches. This paper has two purposes. First, it introduces a new methodology for learning about religious communities by scraping information from denominational find-a-church websites . Second, the paper presents several short analyses that focus…
The Young American Left and Attitudes About Israel
Antisemitic Attitudes among Young Black and Hispanic Americans
Prior research has shown that racial minority groups are more likely than Whites to hold negative views of Jews. We discuss several theories that may explain this phenomenon, including group competition, anti-White attitudes manifesting as antisemitism, spillover from anti-Israel attitudes, and more. Some theories, especially those developed in the mid-20th century, may be less applicable today, particularly to young adults. Through an original s…
Public perceptions of local influence
Who do people think are influential in their own community? This question is important for understanding topics such as social networks, political party networks, civic engagement, and local politics. At the same time as research on these topics has grown, measurement of public perceptions of local influence has dried up. Years ago, researchers took active interest in the question of community influence. They found that most ordinary Americans co…
Introduction to Freedom of Expression in an Age of Social Media, Misinformation, and Political Polarization
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum
Concern about antisemitism in the U.S. has grown following recent rises in deadly assaults, vandalism, and harassment. Public accounts of antisemitism have focused on both the ideological right and left, suggesting a “horseshoe theory” in which the far left and the far right hold a common set of anti-Jewish prejudicial attitudes that distinguish them from the ideological center. However, there is little quantitative research evaluating left-wing …
The Political Role of Business Leaders
What role do business leaders play in American democracy? The dominant narrative in political science holds that business leaders have disproportionate influence; this influence has increased over time; the public opposes business engagement in politics; and a reform agenda could counteract business influence. I contrast this narrative with a second narrative that also emerges from the literature: Business leaders are fragmented and fail to achie…
Who Wants Stakeholder Capitalism? Public and Elite Perceptions of the Role of Business Leaders in Politics
On what policy areas and with what strategies should businesses and their leaders be involved in political activity? Advocates of “stakeholder capitalism” endorse companies and their leaders taking stances on social, environmental, and economic issues that advance the interests of their communities, not just of their shareholders. We juxtapose this view with two alternatives: companies and their leaders should a) stay out of politics or b) advoca…
The Partisan Realignment of American Business: Evidence from a Survey of Corporate Leaders
For decades, the business community has been viewed as a core constituency of the Republican Party. However, several factors, such as corporate prioritization of social values, changes in trade policy, and anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file, suggest a coalitional shift is underway. Scholars have debated whether this shift is an illusion or is real. At the core of this debate is how businesses navigate two forms of organization…
Political science (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Social Media and Politics (8 works)