Angry Ballots: Emotions and Mobilization amid Voter Suppression

• In Event: (De)Mobilizing the Alienated and Discontent

Abstract

When strategic actors design electoral institutions to suppress, they bank on the assumption that higher turnout costs should disincentivize collective action. However, reality indicates a more complicated story. In the past decade, American state legislatures have limited access to the ballot for certain groups by increasing the costs of voting. Yet political science disagrees on the implications and real effects of suppressive electoral institutions. A large body of research shows how such institutional manipulation can decrease turnout for some groups. However, there is evidence that institutional manipulation does not always depress engagement. Some groups remain unmoved, while there is also evidence that manipulation can spur voters to engage even more. These debates, particularly in the United States, are ongoing and often singularly focused on one tool of suppression with disagreement about how voters respond.

In this paper, we offer a solution to the puzzling effects of suppressive electoral institutions. We explore the complicated relationship between the ways actors psychologically engage with suppressive electoral institutions and the costs associated with resisting suppression. We rely on insights from work on political institutions, electoral behavior, and political psychology to construct a theory that explains the behavioral effects of increasing the time a person must spend at a poll on election day (poll burden). The causal mechanism is the specific and different emotional reactions that occur in people who are targeted by poll burden or whose group directly benefits from poll burden. Our theory presumes that institutions condition behavior; however, we show that solely focusing on the costs and benefits that institutions create is not sufficient to understand how people will respond when those institutions are suppressive. We argue that suppressive institutions condition political behavior by asymmetrically distributing political advantage. That is, individuals respond emotionally to suppressive institutions based on whether or not the suppression helps or hurts them (and their group). Those who are politically disadvantaged respond with emotions like anger and fear whereas those politically advantaged display emotions like enthusiasm and happiness. Different emotions mediate different participation decisions.

We test this theory in two complementary ways. First, we leverage election data from the 2020 US Senate election and runoff in Georgia. We implement a difference-in-difference design to test how learning about long lines in the first election affects turnout in the runoff election. We proxy anger by calculating how long a person waited in line in each election. Second, we conducted a novel survey experiment (n = 2000) in the U.S. through YouGov in early 2024. We manipulate a respondent’s likelihood of being targeted by poll burden and ask them which emotions they feel along with several questions measuring their propensity to politically engage in activities like voting and donating money to stop voter suppression.

We find broad support for our theory. In the first test, we show that long lines do not dissuade the politically suppressed from voting. That is, places with heavier poll burden in the first election exhibited increases in participation in the subsequent runoff election. This pattern is nonexistent where lines were shorter; lighter poll burdens did little if anything to generate increased participation. Because we cannot be certain from observational data that emotions are a driving force in our story, we implemented a survey experiment to directly test emotional reactions to poll burden as electoral suppression. We find that long lines make disadvantaged voters angry. Similar to the Georgia case, disadvantaged respondents did not let long lines dissuade them from politically participating. We find significant effects on nearly every participation outcome variable. In the second test, we also show that for politically advantaged respondents, enthusiasm was a primary reaction and they were less likely to politically engage.

This study holds important implications for the study of electoral suppression, specifically in democratic contexts like the United States. We shed new light on the political consequences of illiberal practices in democracy and the role that emotion plays in voter engagement and mobilization. Whereas previous studies disagree about the real effects of suppressive electoral institutions, this research underscores the need to include human emotions as key to understanding why we see such disparate effects. We also provide a new theoretical approach to analyzing the institutional effects on political behavior that includes examining the link between political inequality, emotions, and mobilization.

Authors

• Hilary Izatt, SUNY Binghamton

• Daniel Blyth Magleby, Binghamton University