Michael C Herron
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 318782 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Michael C Herron |
| PRENOMES | Michael C |
| SOBRENOME | Herron |
| ASSINATURA | HERRON M C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2021-2495 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1058 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Assisting the vote? Disability as a cost of voting
Election administration harms and ballot design
We introduce a typology of election administration harms and apply it to empirically study the consequences of ballot design. Our typology distinguishes between individual, electoral, and systemic harms. Together, it clarifies why ballot design can be a particular vulnerability in election administration. Using both ballot‐level and precinct‐level data, we revisit Florida's 2018 United States Senate race, in which Broward County's ballot design f…
Postal delivery disruptions and the fragility of voting by mail
Since the onset in early 2020 of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, mail-in voting rates in states that have held elections have surged, presumably reflecting the fact that voting by mail is a relatively safe mode of ballot casting during a public health crisis. Matters of health notwithstanding, postal delivery disruptions can place mail-in ballots at risk of rejection on the grounds of lateness. With Maine as a case study, we show that…
Voting Lines, Equal Treatment, and Early Voting Check-In Times in Florida
Lines at the polls raise the cost of voting and can precipitate unequal treatment of voters. Research on voting lines is nonetheless hampered by a fundamental measurement problem: little is known about the distribution of time voters spend in line prior to casting ballots. We argue that early, in-person voter check-in times allow us identify individuals who waited in line to vote. Drawing on election administrative records from two General Electi…
Vote-by-mail Ballot Rejection and Experience with Mail-in Voting
Although most ballots in the United States have historically been cast in-person, Americans are increasingly voting by mail, a trend that accelerated in the 2020 General Election. Mail ballots can be rejected after being cast, and our analysis of the Florida general elections of 2016, 2018, and 2020 shows that voters inexperienced with mail voting disproportionately submit ballots that end up rejected due to (1) late arrival at elections offices …
Early Voting Changes and Voter Turnout
Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States
On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although …
Pedagogical Value of Polling-Place Observation by Students
Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 Gen…
An exploration of Donald Trump's allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election
Student sorting and implications for grade inflation
There is a sizable literature on higher education, both in the United States and beyond, that draws attention to the phenomenon known as grade inflation. We offer an interpretation of grade inflation that turns on the choices students have over academic departments, and we argue that patterns in grades cannot be considered in isolation from the incentives that students have to sort themselves strategically across departments. Our argument draws o…
Precinct resources and voter wait times
A Careful Look at Modern Case Selection Methods
Case studies appear prominently in political science, sociology, and other social science fields. A scholar employing a case study research design in an effort to estimate causal effects must confront the question, how should cases be selected for analysis? This question is important because the results derived from a case study research program ultimately and unavoidably rely on the criteria used to select the cases. While the matter of case sel…
Race, Party, and the Consequences of Restricting Early Voting in Florida in the 2012 General Election
In mid-2011, the Florida legislature reduced the state’s early voting period from fourteen days to eight and eliminated the final Sunday of early voting. We compare observed voting patterns in 2012 with those in the 2008 General Election and find that racial/ethnic minorities, registered Democrats, and those without party affiliation had significant early voting participation drops and that voters who cast ballots on the final Sunday in 2008 were…
The Timeline of Presidential Elections
Journal Article The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter Get access The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter by Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2012. 216 pp. Paper, $25.00. Michael C. Herron Michael C. Herron Dartmouth College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarter…
The Effects of House Bill 1355 on Voter Registration in Florida
In mid-2011, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 1355 (HB 1355) and in so doing placed new regulations on community organizations that historically have helped eligible Floridians register to vote. Among the legal changes promulgated by this bill were new regulations on the operations of groups like the League of Women Voters and a new oath, warning of prison time and fines, that voter registration agents were required to sign. Such c…
Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites
This study inquires as to the nature of racial regularities in residual voting that exist under post–Help America Vote Act conditions. Even with modern, optical scan voting machines, there were significant differences among black, Hispanic, and white residual vote rates in the city of Chicago during the Municipal Election of 2011 and the Illinois General Election of 2010. Moreover, these residual vote rates varied with the availability of, respec…
Leapfrog Representation and Extremism
We consider the relationship between the preferences of American voters and the preferences of the U.S. legislators who represent them. Using an Internet-based, national opinion survey in conjunction with legislator voting records from the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that members of Congress are more extreme than their constituents, i.e., that there is a lack of congruence between American voters and members of Congress. We also show that…
Prejudice, Black Threat, and the Racist Voter in the 2008 Presidential Election
We show evidence of prejudiced voting in the 2008 presidential election. We then go deeper to test whether black threat theory explains some of this behavior. The theory finds empirical support, especially in the South. We also show that black concentration in an area works interactively with the socioeconomic status of that area when eliciting white animosity against blacks. In richer areas, black threat theory finds little support, while in poo…
Voting Technology
Gerrymanders and Theories of Law Making
Redistricting politics in Illinois provide a novel opportunity for testing competing theories of law making. With this in mind, we demonstrate that the post-2000 Census redistricters in Illinois, dominated by Democrats, strategically reshuffled district demographic profiles in an attempt to convert relatively liberal Republican districts to conservative Democratic districts in the state Senate while decreasing and increasing the ideological diver…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
Assessing partisan bias in voting technology
Term Limits and Pork
We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term lim…
Black Candidates and Black Voters
Numerous studies show that the rate at which African-Americans cast ballots with missing or invalid votes, i.e., the African-American residual vote rate, is higher than the corresponding white rate. While existing literature argues that the plethora of African-American residual votes is caused by administrative problems or socioeconomic factors, we show using precinct-level data from two recent elections in Cook County, Illinois, that the African…
Logical Inconsistency in EI-Based Second-Stage Regressions
The statistical procedure EI–R, in which point estimates produced by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in a linear regression, can be logically inconsistent insofar as the assumptions necessary to support EI–R's first stage (ecological inference via King's technique) can be incompatible with the assumptions supporting its second stage (linear regression). In light of this problem, we develop a specific…
Leapfrog Representation and Extremism
We consider the relationship between the preferences of American voters and the preferences of the U.S. legislators who represent them. Using an Internet-based, national opinion survey in conjunction with legislator voting records from the 109th and 110th Congresses, we show that members of Congress are more extreme than their constituents, i.e., that there is a lack of congruence between American voters and members of Congress. We also show that…
Leadership and Pandering
We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We ...nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters’ interests may or may not…
The Butterfly Did It
We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. We use multiple methods and several kinds of data to rule out alternative explanations for the votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach County. Among 3,053 U.S. counties where …
Postestimation Uncertainty in Limited Dependent Variable Models
Many political science research articles that use limited dependent variable models report estimated quantities, in particular, fitted probabilities, predicted probabilities, and functions of such probabilities, without indicating that such estimates are subject to uncertainty. This practice, along with the reporting of “percentage correctly predicted,” can overstate the precision of reported results. In light of this, the present article describ…
Black Candidates and Black Voters
Numerous studies show that the rate at which African-Americans cast ballots with missing or invalid votes, i.e., the African-American residual vote rate, is higher than the corresponding white rate. While existing literature argues that the plethora of African-American residual votes is caused by administrative problems or socioeconomic factors, we show using precinct-level data from two recent elections in Cook County, Illinois, that the African…
Race, Party, and the Consequences of Restricting Early Voting in Florida in the 2012 General Election
In mid-2011, the Florida legislature reduced the state’s early voting period from fourteen days to eight and eliminated the final Sunday of early voting. We compare observed voting patterns in 2012 with those in the 2008 General Election and find that racial/ethnic minorities, registered Democrats, and those without party affiliation had significant early voting participation drops and that voters who cast ballots on the final Sunday in 2008 were…
Overvoting and representation
The Influence of Family Regulation, Connection, and Psychological Autonomy on Six Measures of Adolescent Functioning
This study disaggregated parenting styles into three socialization dimensions: connection/involvement, regulation, and psychological autonomy. Six dependent variables were used (grades and educational expectations, psychological and somatic symptoms, and delinquent acts and substance use), and the three socialization measures were associated individually with all six outcomes. When multiple regressions included all three socialization measures si…
Using Ecological Inference Point Estimates as Dependent Variables in Second-Stage Linear Regressions
The practice of using point estimates produced by the King ecological inference technique as dependent variables in second-stage linear regressions leads to second-stage results that, in general, are inconsistent. This conclusion holds even when all assumptions behind King's ecological technique are satisfied. Second-stage inconsistency is a consequence of the fact that King-based point estimates of disaggregated quantities contain errors correla…
Estimating the Economic Impact of Political Party Competition in the 1992 British Election
quences of government partisanship. major problem facing researchers who study the consequences of government partisanship is that it is difficult to ascertain the potential economic impact of governments which, because of election defeats, never existed. Consider, for instance, a Labour government in Britain in 1992, a Conservative government in 1997, or a Dole Administration in the United States. None of these governments actually took office, …
Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections
We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program's allocations among Illinois's 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legisla…
An exploration of Donald Trump's allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election
Term Limits and Pork
We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term lim…
The Effects of House Bill 1355 on Voter Registration in Florida
In mid-2011, the Florida state legislature passed House Bill 1355 (HB 1355) and in so doing placed new regulations on community organizations that historically have helped eligible Floridians register to vote. Among the legal changes promulgated by this bill were new regulations on the operations of groups like the League of Women Voters and a new oath, warning of prison time and fines, that voter registration agents were required to sign. Such c…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
Precinct resources and voter wait times
Assessing partisan bias in voting technology
A Consensus on Second-Stage Analyses in Ecological Inference Models
Since Herron and Shotts (2003a; hereinafter HS), Adolph and King (2003; hereinafter AK), and Herron and Shotts (2003b; hereinafter HS2), the four of us have iterated many more times, learned a great deal, and arrived at a consensus on this issue. This paper describes our joint recommendations for how to run second-stage ecological regressions, and provides detailed analyses to back up our claims
Artificial Extremism in Interest Group Ratings and the Preferences versus Party Debate
Voting Lines, Equal Treatment, and Early Voting Check-In Times in Florida
Lines at the polls raise the cost of voting and can precipitate unequal treatment of voters. Research on voting lines is nonetheless hampered by a fundamental measurement problem: little is known about the distribution of time voters spend in line prior to casting ballots. We argue that early, in-person voter check-in times allow us identify individuals who waited in line to vote. Drawing on election administrative records from two General Electi…
Early Voting Changes and Voter Turnout
Logical Inconsistency in EI‐Based Second‐Stage Regressions
The statistical procedure EI–R, in which point estimates produced by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in a linear regression, can be logically inconsistent insofar as the assumptions necessary to support EI–R's first stage (ecological inference via King's technique) can be incompatible with the assumptions supporting its second stage (linear regression). In light of this problem, we develop a specific…
Law and Data
On television's Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the program's dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires
A Careful Look at Modern Case Selection Methods
Case studies appear prominently in political science, sociology, and other social science fields. A scholar employing a case study research design in an effort to estimate causal effects must confront the question, how should cases be selected for analysis? This question is important because the results derived from a case study research program ultimately and unavoidably rely on the criteria used to select the cases. While the matter of case sel…
Cross-Contamination in EI-R
We address in Herron and Shotts (2003; hereinafter HS) an increasingly common statistical practice called EI-R, in which point estimates generated by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in second-stage linear regressions. Although HS argue that EI-R slope estimates are inconsistent and suffer from attenuation bias, this characterization of EI-R is excessively conservative. Indeed, we show here that EI-R …
Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity.
We describe the development and validation of a new instrument, KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity, designed to assess perceived stimulants and obstacles to creativity in organizational work environments. The KEYS scales have acceptable factor structures, internal consistencies, test-retest reliabilities, and preliminary convergent and discriminant validity. A construct validity study shows that perceived work environments, as assessed by…
The Influence of Family Regulation, Connection, and Psychological Autonomy on Six Measures of Adolescent Functioning
This study disaggregated parenting styles into three socialization dimensions: connection/involvement, regulation, and psychological autonomy. Six dependent variables were used (grades and educational expectations, psychological and somatic symptoms, and delinquent acts and substance use), and the three socialization measures were associated individually with all six outcomes. When multiple regressions included all three socialization measures si…
Postestimation Uncertainty in Limited Dependent Variable Models
Many political science research articles that use limited dependent variable models report estimated quantities, in particular, fitted probabilities, predicted probabilities, and functions of such probabilities, without indicating that such estimates are subject to uncertainty. This practice, along with the reporting of “percentage correctly predicted,” can overstate the precision of reported results. In light of this, the present article describ…
Artificial Extremism in Interest Group Ratings and the Preferences versus Party Debate
Cutpoint-Adjusted Interest Group Ratings
While it is very common for Congressional researchers to use interest group ratings as measures of legislator policy preferences, this paper argues that the manner in which such ratings are calculated implies that they may poorly approximate the underlying legislator preferences on which they are based. In light of this, the paper develops a technique designed to adjust interest group ratings so that they more closely correlate with legislator pr…
Estimating the Economic Impact of Political Party Competition in the 1992 British Election
quences of government partisanship. major problem facing researchers who study the consequences of government partisanship is that it is difficult to ascertain the potential economic impact of governments which, because of election defeats, never existed. Consider, for instance, a Labour government in Britain in 1992, a Conservative government in 1997, or a Dole Administration in the United States. None of these governments actually took office, …
Interest Group Ratings and Regression Inconsistency
This article uses spatial voting theory to analyze the properties of linear regressions that employ interest group ratings as measures of legislator policy preferences. Such regressions, in general, yield inconsistent results. In particular, least-squares estimation of a bivariate regression which contains an interest group rating as a regressor produces an inflated slope estimate. Instrumenting for the rating with a second rating, as proposed by…
Law and Data
On television's Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the program's dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires
Leadership and Pandering
We develop an informational theory that analyzes conditions under which a reelection-seeking executive will act in the public interest. The theory considers factors such as executive competence, challenger quality, and the likelihood that voters will learn the consequences of policy decisions before an upcoming election. We ...nd that an executive who has information suggesting that a popular policy is contrary to voters’ interests may or may not…
The Butterfly Did It
We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush's certified margin of victory in Florida. We use multiple methods and several kinds of data to rule out alternative explanations for the votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach County. Among 3,053 U.S. counties where …
Use of and Attitudes Toward Complementary and Alternative Medicine Among Family Practice Patients in Small Rural Illinois Communities
Context: Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use continues to increase in the United States. Data on rural patients' use and extent of integration of CAM with conventional medicine are lacking, although this is a population often associated with use of “folk remedies” and self‐care strategies Purpose: To examine rural primary care patients' attitudes toward and use of CAM Methods: A total of 176 surveys (70% response rate) were returned …
Using Ecological Inference Point Estimates as Dependent Variables in Second-Stage Linear Regressions
The practice of using point estimates produced by the King ecological inference technique as dependent variables in second-stage linear regressions leads to second-stage results that, in general, are inconsistent. This conclusion holds even when all assumptions behind King's ecological technique are satisfied. Second-stage inconsistency is a consequence of the fact that King-based point estimates of disaggregated quantities contain errors correla…
Cross-Contamination in EI-R
We address in Herron and Shotts (2003; hereinafter HS) an increasingly common statistical practice called EI-R, in which point estimates generated by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in second-stage linear regressions. Although HS argue that EI-R slope estimates are inconsistent and suffer from attenuation bias, this characterization of EI-R is excessively conservative. Indeed, we show here that EI-R …
A Consensus on Second-Stage Analyses in Ecological Inference Models
Since Herron and Shotts (2003a; hereinafter HS), Adolph and King (2003; hereinafter AK), and Herron and Shotts (2003b; hereinafter HS2), the four of us have iterated many more times, learned a great deal, and arrived at a consensus on this issue. This paper describes our joint recommendations for how to run second-stage ecological regressions, and provides detailed analyses to back up our claims
Overvoting and representation
Logical Inconsistency in EI-Based Second-Stage Regressions
The statistical procedure EI–R, in which point estimates produced by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in a linear regression, can be logically inconsistent insofar as the assumptions necessary to support EI–R's first stage (ecological inference via King's technique) can be incompatible with the assumptions supporting its second stage (linear regression). In light of this problem, we develop a specific…
Studying Dynamics in Legislator Ideal Points
Research designs that call for the estimation of time trends in legislator ideal points must allow for changes in underlying policy spaces. Simply put, a set of legislator ideal points from one such space cannot necessarily be compared with a set of ideal points from another. Rothenberg and Sanders's (2000, American Journal of Political Science 44:316–325) analysis of shirking in Congress does not internalize this point insofar as it assumes that…
Government Redistribution in the Shadow of Legislative Elections
We study an Illinois state government program called “member initiative spending” and examine the extent to which three competing theories can explain the program's allocations among Illinois's 118 House districts. We show that member initiative monies distributed before the 2000 general election were disproportionately allocated to districts that were politically competitive, represented by legislative leaders, or represented by moderate legisla…
Logical Inconsistency in EI‐Based Second‐Stage Regressions
The statistical procedure EI–R, in which point estimates produced by the King (1997) ecological inference technique are used as dependent variables in a linear regression, can be logically inconsistent insofar as the assumptions necessary to support EI–R's first stage (ecological inference via King's technique) can be incompatible with the assumptions supporting its second stage (linear regression). In light of this problem, we develop a specific…
Black Candidates and Black Voters
Numerous studies show that the rate at which African-Americans cast ballots with missing or invalid votes, i.e., the African-American residual vote rate, is higher than the corresponding white rate. While existing literature argues that the plethora of African-American residual votes is caused by administrative problems or socioeconomic factors, we show using precinct-level data from two recent elections in Cook County, Illinois, that the African…
Term Limits and Pork
We describe a model of electoral selection and legislative policy choice that explores the effects of term limits on legislative spending. In the model, self‐interested voters in a collection of districts prefer representatives who deliver pork over representatives who maximize aggregate social welfare. Term limits can, in some cases, inhibit voters from selecting representatives who deliver particularistic benefits, and, in these cases, term lim…
Did Ralph Nader Spoil Al Gore’s Presidential Bid? A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election
The 2000 presidential race included two major party candidates - Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore - and two prominent third-party candidates - Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. Although it is often presumed that Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have been cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather misleading. A…
Assessing partisan bias in voting technology
Voting Technology
Gerrymanders and Theories of Law Making
Redistricting politics in Illinois provide a novel opportunity for testing competing theories of law making. With this in mind, we demonstrate that the post-2000 Census redistricters in Illinois, dominated by Democrats, strategically reshuffled district demographic profiles in an attempt to convert relatively liberal Republican districts to conservative Democratic districts in the state Senate while decreasing and increasing the ideological diver…
Political science (32 obras) · Politics (27 obras) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (26 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Voting (23 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Public Administration (15 obras) · Public Administration (15 obras)