Beaches or Boarding?: Shark Attacks, Tourism, and the 1916 Presidential Election

Many recent studies have offered contrasting conclusions as to whether voters punish elected officials in response to “irrelevant events.” One prominent case considers whether shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916, which negatively impacted the tourism industry in the state, prompted voters to punish Woodrow Wilson in his reelection bid. Achen and Bartels (2004, 2016) provide evidence of an electoral penalty, while Fowler and Hall (2018) argue there is no consistent evidence of this penalty – findings Achen and Bartels rebut (2018). This short article revisits this debate by introducing new data on communities’ susceptibility to the negative economic consequences alleged to have prompted electoral harm for Wilson: the size of the local hotel industry. Incorporating information about New Jersey hotels obtained from a contemporaneous travel guide, we find no evidence communities proximate to beaches with large hotel industries exacted stronger penalties against Wilson relative to beach communities without a large concentration of hotels or to non-beach communities. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating into studies of the electoral consequences of irrelevant events historical context and tests of the mechanisms posited to link events to electoral outcomes.