Jonah Berger, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of
Business, conducted a terrific study where he demonstrates that where people vote affects how they vote.
Essentially, people whose voting booth is located in a church are more
likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire
houses care more about safety, and people voting in a school tend to
put more weight on things like education.
Admittedly there is a problem here of isolating causation. Perhaps you go to the polls whose location you know, and if you have kids you know how to find the school, if you are religious you know how to find the church, and so on.
Auren Hoffman, whom I will see next week in Quebec City, concludes:
Your gut might be much better at telling you what not to do than giving
you good direction on what to do. If your gut tells you something is
wrong with someone, than you probably do not want to entrust your kid
with her. But a positive gut-check often does little good (at least for
me).
“Perhaps you go to the polls whose location you know”
I don’t know how it works where you live but everywhere I’ve lived (New York state, Idaho, and Pennsylvania) you have to go to a particular polling place depending on where you live- you don’t get a choice of them.
You chaps vote in CHURCHES? I do learn a lot from this blog.
Since when do people get to choose their polling location? Everywhere I’ve lived (Minnesota, Montana, Virginia, etc.) has assigned a polling location.
The introduction to the study makes clear that the subjects of the study were assigned to their polling places. No choice involved.
The study also does not show that “people whose voting booth is located in a church are more likely to put more weight into social issues, people voting in fire houses care more about safety.” It’s one study on one vote (plus some experimental data on voting about funding public schools) on an education initiative in a school vs. voting on that same initiative in a non-school.
It’s been a long time since I took econometrics, but a .845% increase in the likelihood of voting in approval seems small to me. And this is a study of the effect of being in a school while voting on school funding, which is direct. Indirect effects on other issues would be far smaller.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I fail to see any connection whatsoever between Hoffman’s “conclusion” and Berger’s study. It’s a complete non sequitur.
Did you accidentally mix up paragraphs from two different posts, Prof. Cowen?
Color me skeptical about any causation. I interpret this as some variation on: -Communities with lots of churches are more likely to have both church polling places and voters who care about social issues; voters who live within polling place range of a church are more likely to care about social issues
-Communities with relatively few polling place options besides the fire house are more likely to be the kind of small community where voters care about public safety/know the local public safety workers personally
-Voters who live within polling place assignment range of schools are more likely to have school-age children and care more about education.
etc.
So we should all vote at the county jail!
I’ve seen polling places in churches, schools, community centers, and people’s garages.
Here in San Francisco, I vote in my neighbor’s garage. What does that say about how I’ll vote?
And anyway, polling places are virtually obsolete. Most of us are moving to vote by mail. It’s complete in Oregon (no polling places at all any more), and here in Seattle it’s about 70% by mail. Expect that to go to 100% at some time in the next couple years.
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