When I worked at AU, I’d receive a bunch of calls every November from angry people who thought it was wholly inappropriate to ask voters to go to a house of worship to cast a ballot. It’s a fairly common scenario: some localities don’t have large enough facilities to host a polling station, so officials move the voting booths into a nearby church or church basement. I always understood the complaints, but it’s perfectly legal.
But with those angry callers in mind, I thought this new study from researchers at Stanford’s business school was fascinating. Apparently, there’s evidence to suggest where you vote has an influence on how you vote.
It’s hard to imagine that something as innocuous as polling location (e.g., school, church, or fire station) might actually influence voting behavior, but the Stanford researchers have discovered just that. In fact, Wheeler says “the influence of polling location on voting found in our research would be more than enough to change the outcome of a close election.” And, as seen in the neck-to-neck 2000 presidential election where Al Gore ultimately lost to George W. Bush after months of vote counting in Florida, election biases such as polling location could play a significant role in the 2008 presidential election. Even at the proposition level, “Voting at a school could increase support for school spending or voting at a church could decrease support for stem cell initiatives,” says [S. Christian Wheeler, associate professor of marketing].
Why might something like polling location influence voting behavior? “Environmental cues, such as objects or places, can activate related constructs within individuals and influence the way they behave,” says Berger. “Voting in a school, for example, could activate the part of a person’s identity that cares about kids, or norms about taking care of the community. Similarly, voting in a church could activate norms of following church doctrine. Such effects may even occur outside an individual’s awareness.”
As National Journal noted, the Stanford researchers used data from a 2000 general election in Arizona and found, for example, that voters who cast ballots in a school were slightly more likely to support a sales tax increase to fund education. This effect persisted even when the researchers controlled for — or removed the possibility of — other factors.
It’s not just education.
The researchers also followed up with a lab experiment that allowed for random assignment of voters to pictures of different voting environments that the researchers thought might influence voting behavior. Participants were shown 10 images from well-maintained schools (e.g. lockers, classrooms) or churches (e.g. pews, alters), plus five additional filler images of generic buildings. A control group was shown images of generic buildings.
The participants then voted on a number of initiatives including California’s 2004 stem cell funding initiative, Arizona’s education initiative, and several others. Initiative wording was taken right from each state’s legislative council documents. As predicted by Berger, Meredith, and Wheeler: Environmental cues contained in the photos influenced voting.
Results from the second study showed that participants were less likely to support the stem cell initiative if they were shown church images than if they were shown school images or a generic photo of a building. The subjects also were more likely to support the education initiative if they were shown school images versus church or generic building images. The results further demonstrated that environmental cues present in different polling locations can influence voting outcomes, even when voters are randomly assigned to different environmental cue conditions.
“What our research suggests is that it might be useful to further investigate influences such as polling location to better understand how such factors affect different types of voting situations. From a policy perspective, the hope is that a voting location assignment could be less arbitrary and more determined in order to avoid undue biases in the future,” says Wheeler.
The next question, I suppose, is what politicians and parties may want to do about this. In many precincts, there are practical obstacles to overcome — there just isn’t room other than the local school or house of worship — but if there’s a good chance these factors influence election outcomes, won’t there inevitably be some kind of push to “correct” the problem?