Elections

In the 2010 election cycle, some 54% of adults used the Internet for political purposes, far exceeding the 2006 midterm digital usage rate of 31%.

From fundraising and campaigning to organization and voter recruitment, the Internet has changed electoral politics in America. Because of the Web’s inherently open nature, it was thought that its use would reduce the socioeconomic inequality in U.S. politics, where more affluent citizens and groups often have higher participation rates and thereby exert greater power.

Vote-by-mail and early in-person voting are common forms of convenience voting, which gives citizens flexibility in deciding when to vote. The goal has been to increase voter turnout, but a University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University study indicates there can be unanticipated consequences.

Numerous studies have found that voter turnout rates increase with years of formal education. The precise nature of any causal relationship, however, is a matter of debate among social scientists.

In the absence of a constitutional mandate, the political parties in the United States have had to invent their own methods for selecting presidential candidates. States such as Iowa rely on caucuses — party-specific gatherings where participants publicly declare their candidate preference. Questions remain, however, about the fairness and representative nature of that particular electoral process.

A growing feeling among advocacy traditionalists is that recruiting supporters through mass-email blasts has spawned a lazier form of activism, sometimes referred to as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism.” However, whether or not the tags of “lazy” or “ineffective” are accurate remains a subject of ongoing inquiry and debate.

Seventeen states have implemented controversial legislation requiring a photo ID in order to vote, including six states that enacted such laws in the wake of the 2010 elections. Opponents of voter ID requirements assert that photo ID requirements tend to disenfranchise the poor, younger, elderly, minority, urban and highly mobile voters. Proponents of such laws, typically Republicans, cite the ubiquity of photo IDs in modern society and the need to protect the integrity of the voting process.

Political science research continues to focus on the question of how racial cues may affect voter choice. Though research findings have been mixed, some studies have furnished strong evidence that race remains a significant factor in American elections.

Scholars from Northwestern University set out to study an underappreciated aspect of public opinion and communications: how the sequence and timing of messages from electoral and policy campaigns can shape views over longer intervals of time. Typically, as the scholars point out, experimental research has focused on the short-term effects of a given message on the public and has found that two competing, simultaneous messages can cancel one another out.