The authors develop a model in which special-interest groups make political contributions in order to influence an incumbent government's choice of trade policy. The interest groups bid for protection with their campaign support. Politicians maximize their own welfare, which depends on total contributions collected and on the welfare of voters. The authors study the structure of protection that emerges in the political equilibrium and the contributions by different lobbies that support the policy outcome. They also discuss why the lobbies may in some cases prefer to have the government use trade policy to transfer income, rather than more efficient means. Copyright 1994 by American Economic Association.

Protection For Sale

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

We develop a model in which special interest groups make political contributions in order to influence an incumbent government's choice of trade policy. In the political equilibrium. the interest groups bid for protection, and each group's offer is optimal given the offers of the others. The politicians maximize their own welfare. which depends on the total amount of contributions collected and on the aggregate welfare of voters. We study the structure of protection that emerges in political equilibrium and the equilibrium contributions that are made by the different industry lobby groups. and show why these groups may in some cases prefer to have the government use trade policy to transfer income rather than more efficient means. We also discuss how our framework might be extended to include endogenous formation of lobby groups. political competition between incumbents and challengers. and political outcomes in a multicountry trading system.

Protection for Sale

Psychologists have worried about the distortions introduced into standardized personality measures by social desirability bias. Survey researchers have had similar concerns about the accuracy of survey reports about such topics as illicit drug use, abortion, and sexual behavior. The article reviews the research done by survey methodologists on reporting errors in surveys on sensitive topics, noting parallels and differences from the psychological literature on social desirability. The findings from the survey studies suggest that misreporting about sensitive topics is quite common and that it is largely situational. The extent of misreporting depends on whether the respondent has anything embarrassing to report and on design features of the survey. The survey evidence also indicates that misreporting on sensitive topics is a more or less motivated process in which respondents edit the information they report to avoid embarrassing themselves in the presence of an interviewer or to avoid repercussions from third parties.

https://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/images/a/a8/Tourangeau_SensitiveQuestions.pdf

Sensitive questions in surveys.

Practical Surveys. Cornerstones of a Quality Survey. Deciding What Information You Need. Choosing a Survey Method. When and How to Select a Sample. Writing Good Questions. Questionnaire Design. Setting Your Survey in Motion and Getting It Done. From Questionnaires to Survey Results. Reporting Survey Results. Advice, Resources, and Maintaining Perspective. References. Index.

How to conduct your own survey

Many claims are being made about the advantages of conducting surveys on the Web. However, there has been little research on the effects of format or design on the levels of unit and item response or on data quality. In a study conducted at the University of Michigan, a number of experiments were added to a survey of the student pop- ulation to assess the impact of design features on resulting data quality. A sample of 1,602 students was sent an e-mail invitation to participate in a Web survey on attitudes toward affirmative action. Three experi- ments on design approaches were added to the survey application. One experiment varied whether respondents were reminded of their progress through the instrument. In a second experiment, one version presented several related items on one screen, while the other version presented one question per screen. In a third experiment, for one series of questions a random half of the sample clicked radio buttons to indicate their answers, while the other half entered a numeric response in a box. This article discusses the overall implementation and outcome of the survey, and it describes the results of the imbedded design experiments.

Web Survey Design and Administration

This paper presents the results of a project which validated the reported registration and voting behavior of respondents in a national election study. The accuracy of reported voting behavior in the 1976 general election is assessed in terms of the demographic characteristics of the respondents to the Center for Political Studies National Election Study as well as the extent of their participation in a survey panel begun in 1972. Increased levels of registration and turnout are observed in association with the number of interviews in which respondents participated, and three alternative social psychological models of the effects of preelection interviews are evaluated. Although the interview apparently served as a stimulus to voting, neither a model associated with self-concept theory nor alienation theory appears to explain the phenomenon adequately. The interview effect is significant and appears to be cumulative, indicating that researchers using the survey method with panel designs should be sensitive to the effects of their method on the behavior which they are trying to measure. Michael W. Traugott is Study Director in the Center for Political Studies and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, and John P. Katosh is Assistant Study Director in the Center for Political Studies, The University of Michigan. Portions of the data utilized in this research were made available by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for the CPS 1976 American National Election Study were originally collected under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Neither the original collectors of the data nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Public Opinion Quarterly ? 1979 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/79/0043-359/$1.75 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:44:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 360 MICHAEL W. TRAUGOTT AND JOHN P. KATOSH first national study to replicate that effort based upon the panel study of the American electorate conducted by the Center for Political Studies from 1972 to 1976. The presentation includes a discussion of the magnitude of the misreporting of registration status and voting behavior as well as the characteristics of those who are most likely to misreport their registration or voting. It also includes an evaluation of three competing explanations of an apparent "interview effect" on voting behavior. Estimating Registration and Voting from Surveys Clausen's report on the results of the 1964 vote validation study stands to date as the only major investigation of the validity of voting reports in surveys. Clausen began his analysis by examining the relationship between estimates of voting derived from the Survey Research Center's (SRC) 1964 Election Study and the Census Bureau's Voting Supplement to the November 1964 Current Population Survey (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1965). He attempted to explain the overreport of turnout by respondents in two surveys by differences between the samples and the electorate as a whole. This resulted in adjustments to both the numerator and denominator of the official turnout estimate to make them more comparable to the sampled populations in both of the surveys. He then compared that "revised" official estimate of voting with the turnout estimates from each of the surveys. Finally, he reported on the results of an official records check in an attempt to ascertain the sources and consequences of the remaining differences in turnout estimates. The data reported here are based upon equivalent surveys conducted in conjunction with the 1976 presidential election. We have attempted to replicate in our study the procedures Clausen used in 1964. The two survey sources are (1) the Center for Political Studies (CPS) 1976 National Election Study, which yielded an estimated turnout rate of 72 percent, and (2) the Census Bureau's Voting Supplement to the November 1976 Current Population Survey (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1978), which yielded an estimated turnout rate of 59 percent. Both of these turnout estimates exceed the official estimate of turnout of 54 percent, which was based upon actual election re-

Response Validity in Surveysof Voting Behavior

One of the most frequently observed survey measurement errors is theoverreporting of voting behavior. Almost since the series of AmericanNational Election Studies (NES) began, the level of survey reported turn-out has been higher than estimates of turnout based on aggregate votetotals and census counts of the population (Clausen 1968). In addition,validation studies have conﬁrmed that respondents will tend to overreportvoting (Abelson, Loftus, and Greenwald 1992; Parry and Crossley 1950;Presser, Traugott, and Traugott 1990; Silver, Anderson, and Abramson1986; Traugott and Katosh 1979).Two different explanations of overreporting have been tendered. Oneexplanation considers overreporting the result of social desirability, in

Reducing vote overreporting in surveys : Social desirability, memory failure, and source monitoring

Election administrators and public officials often consider changes in electoral laws, hoping that these changes will increase voter turnout and make the electorate more reflective of the voting-age pop- ulation. The most recent of these innovations is voting-by-mail (VBM), a procedure by which ballots are sent to an address for every registered voter. Over the last 2 decades, VBM has spread across the United States, unaccompanied by much empirical evaluation of its impact on either voter turnout or the stratification of the electorate. In this study, we fill this gap in our knowledge by assessing the impact of VBM in one state, Oregon. We carry out this assessment at the individual level, using data over a range of elections. We argue that VBM does increase voter turnout in the long run, primarily by making it easier for current voters to continue to participate, rather than by mobilizing nonvoters into the electorate. These effects, however, are not uniform across all groups in the electorate. Although VBM in Oregon does not exert any influence on the partisan composition of the electorate, VBM increases, rather than diminishes, the resource stratification of the electorate. Contrary to the expectations of many reformers, VBM advantages the resource- rich by keeping them in the electorate, and VBM does little to change the behavior of the resource-poor. In short, VBM increases turnout, but it does so without making the electorate more descriptively represen- tative of the voting-age population.

Michael W. Traugott

Papers

Web Survey Design and Administration

Response Validity in Surveysof Voting Behavior

Reducing vote overreporting in surveys : Social desirability, memory failure, and source monitoring

Who Votes by Mail?: A Dynamic Model of the Individual-Level Consequences of Voting-by-Mail Systems

The Consequences of Validated and Self-Reported Voting Measures