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Replication data for: "Testing proximity versus directional voting using experiments"

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication data for: "Testing proximity versus directional voting using experiments"
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26679
 
Creator Paolino, Philip and Lacy, Dean
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description A long-running debate about how voters use issues to evaluate candidates pits the proximity theory of voting against directional theory. Using surveys, both sides of the debate have found support for their preferred theory, but disagreement remains because of differing ways of analyzing the data. To avoid these difficulties, our approach creates fictitious candidates with controlled positions, presents these candidates to randomly-assigned subjects, and examines the relationship between subjects' evaluations of these candidates and their ideological beliefs as a neutral test of proximity and directional theory. Our results provide reasonably strong support for proximity theory but little for directional theory.