Reference no: EM133628229

Read How Different Polling Locations Subconsciously Influence Voters, by Ben Pryor, The Conversation, February 29, 2016.

According to Robert Dahl, the "key characteristic of a democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens." This formulation of democracy requires two steps: (1) citizens to have clear preferences that they express, and (2) officials to respond to these. A break in either of these steps causes Dahl's democratic formulation to be distorted. If people lack well-defined opinions, or if people are unable to vote in a manner consistent with their desires, then most people are unable to provide meaningful information to policymakers through elections, and when this occurs, the populace is unable to elect people who will carry out their desired policies.

Ben Pryor, in "How Different Polling Locations Subconsciously Influence Voters," shows that something as simple as polling location changes how people vote. He notes that when someone's polling location is in a school, it makes them more likely to vote in favor of education funding, whereas when someone's polling location is in a church they become more likely to support conservative candidates and oppose gay marriage. Additional research has shown that the candidate whose name appears first on the ballot tends to receive additional votes, bad weather tends to increase votes for nonincumbents, rain tends to depresses voter turnout by about 1%-which in turn tends to favor Republican candidates-and when a hometown's college football team wins, an incumbent running for reelection will often reap extra votes. There has even been a study that showed that an uptick in shark attacks in the months before an election led to fewer votes being cast for an incumbent! People tend to think that they're voting based on rational reasons based on everything they've read, heard, or watched, but the forementioned studies and numerous other studies challenge the "rational voter" model of elections. If the rules of the game, and even such arbitrary phenomena such as rain, polling location, ballot order, football victories, and shark attacks influence voting behavior, then perhaps we need to question if elections constitute a meaningful way to select leaders and policies, and we might also need to ask if elections (even free and fair ones) allow people to get what they want through the ballot box.

1. How does the article describe the process of "priming"?

2. What specific effects of priming does the article cite to support its claim that the use of churches and schools as polling locations can influence voting behavior?

3. Should states avoid the use of schools and churches as polling locations? Can any location be completely free from the effect of "priming" voters?

4. What are the broader implications of knowing that voting behavior can be altered through arbitrary phenomena such as polling location?