糖心TV

Unlisted in America

Professor Simon Jackman, Stanford Professor of Political Science, co-Director of the Stanford Centre for American Democracy and one of the principal investigators of the American National Election Studies

Interest in the forthcoming American presidential election is growing. In a timely visit to 糖心TV, Professor Jackman will talk about the work he is undertaking with Brad Spahn – abstract below:

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters and political scientists increasingly rely on voter registration lists and consumer files to identify targets for registration, persuasion and mobilization, and as sampling frames for surveys. However, a sizable proportion of the U.S. citizen population does not appear on these lists, making them invisible to list-based campaigns and research.

How large is the unlisted population? Are their preferences ignorable? What political consequences follow from a list-based view of the polity?

We address these questions after matching respondents to the face-to-face component of the 2012 American National Election Study (using an address-based sampling design) to voter and consumer files. We tests for differences on hundreds of variables in the ANES survey between listed and unlisted populations, limiting Type-1 errors via control of the False Discovery Rate.

At least 11% of the U.S. adult citizenry is unlisted. 1 in 5 Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unlisted, but just 8% of Whites. The unlisted earn less income and are less likely to have health insurance or own their own home than the listed population. The unlisted have markedly lower levels of political engagement than the listed and report close to no contact with candidates and campaigns whatsoever.

Yet, the unlisted have coherent policy preferences that tend to the left of listed respondents. Unlisted ANES respondents reported favoring Obama over Romney 73-27 and just 14% identify as Republicans. The exclusion of the unlisted has important practical and normative implications for political representation, measures of public opinion, election outcomes and public policy.

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The event is open to all staff and graduate students so please come along if this is of interest to you.

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