A new document has been added to the Society for Political Methodology Website.

Title: Do Shark Attacks Influence Presidential Elections? Reassessing a Prominent Finding on Voter Competence

Author(s): Anthony Fowler, Andrew Hall

Entry Date: 2016-11-01

Keyword(s): american elections, replication, retrospective voting

Abstract: We reassess Achen and Bartels' (2002, 2016) prominent claim that shark attacks influence presidential elections, and we find that the evidence is, at best, inconclusive. First, we assemble data on every fatal shark attack in U.S. history and county-level returns from every presidential election between 1872 and 2012, and we find little systematic evidence that shark attacks hurt incumbent presidents or their party. Second, we show that Achen and Bartels' finding of fatal shark attacks hurting Woodrow Wilson's vote share in the beach counties of New Jersey in 1916 becomes substantively smaller and statistically weaker under alternative specifications. Third, we find that their town-level result for beach townships in Ocean County significantly shrinks when we correct errors associated with changes in town borders and does not hold for the other beach counties in New Jersey. Lastly, implementing placebo tests in state-elections where there were no shark attacks, we demonstrate that Achen and Bartels' result was likely to arise even if shark attacks do not influence elections. Overall, there is little compelling evidence that shark attacks influence presidential elections, and any such effect-if one exists-is substantively negligible.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/node/1475

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