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13 February 2006

Tolbert on Same-Sex Marriage Ballot Initiatives in 2004

This week's session of PPBW features a paper by Todd Donovan, Caroline Tolbert, and Daniel Smith titled "Direct Democracy, Agendas, and the Presidential Vote." The paper argues that same-sex marriage bans on state ballots influenced the outcome of the 2004 presidential election by affecting the issue agenda and priming voters to consider the candidates in terms of the views of gay marriage. This is a more specific -- and testable -- hypothesis than the general debate that has taken place about "moral values" in 2004.

This study draws from agenda-setting and issue priming theories to develop hypotheses about how state-level ballot propositions may affect presidential elections. We propose that ballot measure prime voters to evaluate candidates in terms of policy questions placed on their state ballot. We test if concerns about gay marriage in 2004 had greater salience for voters in states where proposals to ban gay marriage were on the ballot, and test the impact of gay marriage on presidential vote choice. We find that gay marriage was more likely to be cited as an issue use to evaluate candidates by some residents of states with marriage ban propositions. We also find respondents who were concerned about gay marriage who resided in states with the issue on the ballot were more likely to vote for Bush. The research is among the first to show that state ballot propositions may have subtle but important effect in presidential elections.

PS - Elisabeth Gerber is speaking Wednesday in the American politics research workshop on "The Impact of State Fiscal Policies on Local Government Inequality."

Posted by Barry Burden at February 13, 2006 10:03 AM