My thoughts on Hall and Fowler ”Do Shark Attacks Influence Presidential Elections?” (Spoiler alert: They don’t!)

One of the most conspicuous findings in political behavior the past twenty years has been Achen and Bartel’s (2016) finding that shark attacks on the Jersey shore negatively affected support for President Woodrow Wilson in the coastal counties of New jersey in the 1916 presidential election. The finding was recently published in Achen and Bartel’s book “Democracy for Realists”, which broadly criticizes the notion that citizens hold their government electorally accountable for enacted policies and policy outcomes in any meaningful way — an argument which seems especially compelling in the year of the Donald. The shark attacks finding, however, has circulated in the form of a working paper since 2004 (maybe before this?). It currently has 338 citations on google scholar.

In a brand new working paper (I saw it for the first time last night) Anthony Fowler and Andrew Hall challenge the shark attack finding. The thing I found most compelling was extending the analysis to other shark attacks than those in the 1916 election in New Jersey. When they do this they find a relatively precisely estimated null effect; shark attacks do not have an effect on election results.

They also throw some shade on the original New Jersey finding, which they show is not super robust to (1) reasonable alternative ways of slicing the sample of counties/towns examined, (2) reasonable alternative ways specifying the control variables, (3) correcting some small errors and (4) applying a more reasonable set of standard errors.

Based on these results, I no longer think that shark attacks influence presidential elections in the way originally suggested by Achen and Bartels — voters do not punish the incumbent president for shark attacks. Something I thought might be the case before reading the Fowler and Hall study (I was never completely convinced by the New Jersey findings, because of the small and curious sample).

Okay, so why does this even matter? It matters because the shark attack finding has been used to challenge the quality electoral democracy. If voters let stuff the incumbent president has little or no control over influence their evaluation of the incumbent president, then voters capacity to elect competent political leaders is put into question. At least that is how Achen and Bartels interpret the findings in ‘Democracy for Realists’ (some have challenged this interpretation).

In addition to providing a sorely needed ‘win’ for electoral democracy, the paper also sparked some additional thoughts for me. Here they are, in no particular order:

First, the findings in the Hall and Fowler paper seriously challenge the idea that innocuous and irrelevant events have a sizeable impact on election results. Especially if one reads the paper in light of Fowlers other recent co-authored paper, which shows that another irrelevant event, the result of college football games, which was thought to have an effect on election results, may not have an effect either.

Second, the findings tell us that voters do at least a bit of what one might call ‘decomposition’ before holding incumbents accountable for how their life is turning out. Voters do not simply make a summary judgment of how life is going overall — including whether someone was attacked by a shark or whether the local college football team won or lost — and use this summary judgment to evaluate how well the incumbent is doing. Voters decompose, deciding to hold the incumbent accountable for some parts of how their life is going, but not for other parts which are blatantly irrelevant. Of course this does not mean that voters necessarily focus on the most relevant factors when evaluating incumbent politicians (although they might).

Third, as the authors note themselves, there appears to be a danger in simply concluding that findings are interesting because they deviate from some rational benchmark (e.g., voter’s should not be affected by the price of ice cream in Bogota, let us see if they are), because there are a million ways that one can deviate from rationality, and this becomes a multiple comparison problem — some deviations will be statistically significant even though isno real deviation. I am not sure what to do about this, but I think that it tells us something about the value of approaching our empirical material with competing models of human behavior (rational choice, evolutionary psychology or group identity), rather than just looking at deviations from one model.

Fourth, the Fowler and Hall findings will probably feed into the larger debate on the replication crisis in the social sciences and psychology (cf. power poses). However, I think this paper is evidence of a replication blessing, not a replication crisis. I do not think that Fowler and Hall, had they been in the same place in their careers as they are now, would have bothered replicating Achen and Bartels paper five years ago, much less ten years ago. It would not necessarily have been worth it. However, the field is in a place right now where careful replications are actually being rewarded in the currency most valuable to social scientist: respect from their peers. For evidence of this, consider that I am taking the time to write this. Some additional evidence: Ryan Enos tweet about this study got 36 retweets (so far), about the same number of retweets as a tweet Enos made about one of his own, original studies two weeks ago. This is good news! Social science is becoming more self-correcting, and we are incresingly giving people credit for being ‘correctors’ (although we are by no means as far down this road as we should be).

Finally, it is important to note that the Fowler and Hall paper in no way invalidates the broader claim in ‘Democracy for Realist’, nor do the authors claim that their paper does so. The argument in the book about how to understand elections remains defensible independently of the shark attack results.