Research

PUBLICATIONS

• Conevska, Aleksandra, and Can Mutlu. Forthcoming. When Do Voters Stop Caring? Estimating the Shape of Voters’ Utility Functions. American Political Science Review. 

Abstract: In this paper, we address a longstanding puzzle over the functional form that better approximates voter utility from political choices. Though it has become the norm in the literature to represent voter utility with concave loss functions, for decades scholars have underscored this assumption’s potential shortcomings. Yet there exists little to no evidence to support one functional form assumption over another. We fill this gap by first identifying electoral settings where the different functional forms generate divergent predictions over voters’ ballot choices. We then assess which functional form better matches observer voter behavior using Cast Vote Record (CVR) data that captures the anonymized ballots of millions of voters in the 2020 U.S. general elections. Contrary to the generally assumed concave loss functions, our findings indicate that voters' utility function exhibits convexity at its tails, suggesting that the convex and especially the reverse S-shaped functions better predict observed voter behavior.

• Conevska, A., Hirano, S., Kuriwaki, S., Lewis, J. B., Mutlu, C., Snyder, J. M. (2026). How Partisan are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records. American Political Science Review.

Abstract: Analyzing nominally partisan contests, previous literature has argued that state and local politics have nationalized. Here we use individual ballots from the 2020 general elections covering over 50 million voters to study the relationship between individual national partisanship and voting in over 5,700 contested down-ballot contests, including nonpartisan races and ballot measures. Voting in partisan contests can be explained by voter’s national partisanship, consistent with existing literature. However, we find that voting for local nonpartisan offices and ballot measures is much less partisan. National partisanship explains more than 80% of the within-contest variation in voting for partisan state and local offices but less than 10% for local nonpartisan contests and local ballot measures. The degree of partisanship in local spending measures varies by the type of service—for example, education, roads, public safety, housing. Finally, we find evidence of structure in the pattern of votes on local spending measures. 

• Kuriwaki, S., Reece, M., Baltz, S., Conevska, A., Loffredo, J. R., Mutlu, C., Samarth, T., Acevedo Jetter, K. E., Djanogly Garai, Z., Murray, K., Hirano, S., Lewis, J. B., Snyder, J. M., Jr., and Stewart, C., III (2024). Cast vote records: A database of ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election. Nature Scientific Data, 11, 1304.

Abstract: Ballots are the core records of elections. Electronic records of actual ballots cast (cast vote records) are available to the public in some jurisdictions. However, they have been released in a variety of formats and have not been independently evaluated. Here we introduce a database of cast vote records from the 2020 U.S. general election. We downloaded publicly available unstandardized cast vote records, standardized them into a multi-state database, and extensively compared their totals to certified election results. Our release includes vote records for President, Governor, U.S. Senate and House, and state upper and lower chambers, covering 42.7 million voters in 20 states who voted for more than 2,200 candidates. This database serves as a uniquely granular administrative dataset for studying voting behavior and election administration. Using this data, we show that in battleground states, 1.9 percent of solid Republicans (as defined by their congressional and state legislative voting) in our database split their ticket for Joe Biden, while 1.2 percent of solid Democrats split their ticket for Donald Trump. 

WORKING PAPERS

• On the Rationale for Abstention: Partial Punishment Without Ticket Splitting. Job Market Paper.

Abstract: Existing accounts of electoral abstention emphasize limited information, low salience, lack of care, and ballot fatigue as generic drivers of abstention. Split-ticket voting, by contrast, is treated as a politically meaningful response to candidate evaluations. Using anonymized cast vote records covering 41 million voters and 1,306 contests in the 2020 U.S. general election, I analyze roll-off jointly with split-ticket voting across partisan and ideological groups. Most roll-off reflects forces generic to both parties' supporters: Democratic- and Republican-leaning voters' abstention rates move together across races. Yet partisan asymmetries in roll-off track asymmetries in ticket splitting: this evaluative component of abstention is consistent with some partisans punishing their own candidate by abstaining rather than supporting the party opposite. Registration records from nine states show that the same generic-and-evaluative structure extends to turnout. Abstention is not uniformly generic disengagement; it can constitute constrained partisan defection---a form of partial punishment that contributes to electoral accountability.

• Ideology, Party, and Split-Ticket Voting (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James M. Snyder, Jr.).  American Political Science Review. Revise and Resubmit.

Abstract: This paper examines voting as a function of ideology and partisanship at the individual level, using cast vote record (CVR) data in 2020. The dataset covers over 50 million voters across 1400 national, state, and local races. We use statewide ballot measures to estimate each voter's ideological position, and partisan offices to measure partisanship. We find (i) ideological centrist voters are more likely to split their ticket than non-centrists; (ii) voters who split their tickets at one level of government are more likely to split their ticket at other levels; (iii) when ideological non-centrists swing towards one party's candidate in a given race, ideological centrists also swing towards that candidate; (iv) when strong party supporters swing towards one party's candidate in a given race, then weak party supporters also swing towards that candidate. We then investigate the relationship between split-ticket voting and measures of candidate valence, including incumbency, endorsements by newspapers and interest groups, scandals, and expert evaluations. We find that voting on the basis of candidate valence is more related to the strength of party support than to ideology. By contrast, voting on basis of candidate ideology is related to both strength of party support and voter ideology. Voters who are weak party supporters and who do not share the ideology of the incumbent vote significantly more for more moderate incumbents. Overall, the results suggest that even today, centrists and weak party supporters can play a key role in U.S. elections.

• When to Unite, to Divide and Rule?. Journal of Theoretical Politics. Revise and Resubmit.

Abstract: It is generally assumed that, in the jurisdiction and border formation processes, regional and societal heterogeneities are costly. Yet, history presents us with instances where the the ruling elite opted for the amalgamation of heterogeneous regions and societal groups under the same jurisdictions, even when fragmentation was feasible. The motivations for these amalgamation policies are not well understood. This paper develops a game-theoretic model to explain the rationale behind these policies and study their implications. If correlated, certain forms of heterogeneities can ease the co-option of specific civilian groups and the ruling elite can prolong their rule over the colonial territories by resorting to amalgamation policies that create these heterogeneities. While this rationale can especially be observed in the jurisdiction formation policies in the colonial era, it also extends to settings where political elite initiates structural and institutional changes with similar motives.

WORK IN PROGRESS

• Voting under Different Rules: How Electoral Institutions Shape Partisan and Ideological Voting (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

• Beyond Party and Ideology: Issue Voting in Down-Ballot Elections (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

• The Political Geography of Ideology and Partisanship: Measuring Local Political Space from Cast Vote Records (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

• Voter Fatigue or Office Type (with James Snyder)

• Who Stands Where on Climate (with Aleksandra Conevska)

• When Are Parties ‘Good’ For The Environment? (with Aleksandra Conevska)

OTHER WORK

• Mutlu, C., Atalan, Y., Jensen, B. (2024). When to Reveal Military Capabilities? SSRN Electronic Journal.

• Jensen, B., Atalan, Y., Mutlu, C., Macias III, J. M. (2024). Competition in the shadow of technology. Center for Strategic and International Studies.