TY - JOUR A1 - Alexander, Dan A1 - Magazinnik, Asya T1 - Income Inequality and Electoral Theories of Polarization JF - Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy N2 - Both the academic political science literature and the popular discourse are replete with narratives seeking to explain the concurrent rise of income inequality and legislative polarization over the past half century. We focus on a prominent subset of such accounts, which posit the faithful representation of polarizing constituencies as the key causal mechanism linking the two phenomena, and which we therefore refer to as “electoral theories of polarization.” We show, however, that constructing a coherent, causal electoral theory of polarization is substantially more complicated than the literature has appreciated. First, we enumerate the necessary ingredients, with special emphasis on the importance of accounting for electoral geography. Second, we develop a causal framework for assessing the effect of income on polarization via a particular electoral channel, and we propose a set of estimation strategies that researchers may tailor to their particular model of how legislative ideology and partisanship are (co)determined. Third, we apply our framework to evaluate how well a model of self-interested “pocketbook voting” can explain patterns of polarization on the economic dimension observed in the U.S. Senate from 1984 to 2018. We conclude that voters’ private benefit from redistribution is unlikely to be a mechanism linking inequality to polarization. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1561/113.00000062 VL - 3 IS - 3-4 SP - 317 EP - 342 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Abramson, Scott F. A1 - Kocak, Korhan A1 - Magazinnik, Asya T1 - What Do We Learn About Voter Preferences From Conjoint Experiments? JF - American Journal of Political Science N2 - Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (AMCE), is not well defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result, we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12714 VL - 66 IS - 4 SP - 1008 EP - 1020 ER -