Voter turnout in presidential primaries: A cross-sectional examination

Decades of individual and aggregate level research suggest that three sets of factors influence voter turnout: the socioeconomic makeup of the potential voter; legal restrictions on voting; and the political context of each election. In this brief study, we use state-level data to test whether these factors combine to account for variations in turnout rates in the electoral arena of presidential primaries. As expected, high turnout is associated with states which have high median levels of education, lenient legal restrictions on voting, and a history of competitive two-party elections. Also congruent with our expectations, but at odds with research of other electoral arenas, high turnout in presidential primaries is unrelated to high campaign spending or close elections. We contend that spending in presidential primaries may be simply too low to stimulate turnout and that close primaries do not enhance turnout because voters are often unaware that the pending election will be close.The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order and imply that this study is in every way a collaborative enterprise.     

Does Voting History Matter? Analysing Persistence in Turnout

Individuals who vote in one election are more likely to vote in the next. Yet modelling the causal relationship between past and current voting decisions is intrinsically difficult, as this positive association can exist due to habit formation or unobserved heterogeneity. This article overcomes this problem using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study (NCDS) to examine voter turnout across three elections. It distinguishes between unobserved heterogeneity caused by fixed individual characteristics and the initial conditions problem, which occurs when voting behavior in a previous, but unobserved, period influences current voting behavior. It finds that, controlling for fixed effects, unobserved heterogeneity has little impact on the estimated degree of habit in voter turnout; however, failing to control for initial conditions reduces the estimate by a half. The results imply that voting in one election increases the probability of voting in a subsequent election by 13%.     

The Effect of Voting Technology on Voter Turnout: Do Computers Scare the Elderly?

In the aftermath of the Florida debacle in the 2000 Presidential election, there has been an emphasis on replacing voting equipment perceived as inferior (e.g., punch card ballots) with more technologically advanced voting methods. It is possible, however, that not all voters will be comfortable with high-tech voting devices. Elderly voters, for example, might be familiar with the old voting machines but apprehensive about computerized voting. If this is the case, the fear of new voting technology might cause the turnout of elderly voters to decrease. We test for this effect by analyzing the change in voter turnout across Georgia counties in the two most recent gubernatorial elections, as it relates to the share of the counties’ populations that is over the age of 65 years. Consistent with the hypothesis that computers scare the elderly, we find a significantly negative relationship between the change in voter turnout and the elderly share of the population. An additional 1% of the population that is elderly is associated with a 0.3–0.4% decrease in turnout. The hypothesis that elderly voters were apprehensive about the change in voting technology is also supported by the increase in absentee balloting.     

The embarrassment of riches? A meta-analysis of individual-level research on voter turnout

Voter turnout has puzzled political scientists ever since Anthony Downs postulated the paradox of voting. Despite decades of research aiming to understand what drives citizens to the polls, the jury is still out on what the foundations of micro-level turnout are. This paper aims to provide a modest yet important contribution by taking a step back and summarizing where we stand and what we know. To this end, we review 90 empirical studies of individual level voter turnout in national elections published in ten top-journals during the past decade (2000–2010). Through a meta-analysis of the results reported in these studies, this paper identifies those factors that are consistently linked to individual level turnout.     

Election Laws,Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unanticipated Consequences of Election Reform

State governments have experimented with a variety of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The impacts of these reforms vary in surprising ways, providing insight into the mechanisms by which states can encourage or reduce turnout. Our theory focuses on mobilization and distinguishes between the direct and indirect effects of election laws. We conduct both aggregate and individual‐level statistical analyses of voter turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The results show that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas the most popular reform—early voting—is actually associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself. We propose that early voting has created negative unanticipated consequences by reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals and altering the incentives for political campaigns to invest in mobilization.     

Community size, heterogeneity and voter turnouts

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a different interpretation. Larger communities are more heterogeneous than smaller ones, and turnouts are inversely related to the heterogeneity of a community. We present empirical support for this hypothesis using data for voter turnouts in Norwegian school language referendums. Community size is found to have a negative effect on voter turnouts, even after accounting for the probability of a single vote being decisive and the linguistic dimension of this heterogeneity. Our findings question the adequacy of the turnout regression in testing the rational voter hypothesis, as neither a positive correlation between closeness and turnout, nor a negative correlation between size and turnout can be exclusively attributed to instrumental voting.     

Time to vote?

Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to measure these costs accurately, outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New Zealand. We calculate distance and travel time by road from the place of residence to the nearest polling place and combine our time estimate with imputed wages for all sample members. Using this new measure of the opportunity cost of voting to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small increases in the opportunity costs of time can have large effects in reducing voter turnout.     

Explaining voter turnout patterns: An information theory

Voting research is rich in empirical regularities yet a parsimonious theory of voter turnout that can match the facts has proven to be elusive. This paper argues that voter turnout patterns can be explained by extending the traditional rational voter model to include limited information. A model is presented in which utility-maximizing consumers receive higher payoffs from voting the more confident they are of their vote choice. The model provides an explanation for the most important cross-sectional voter turnout patterns. In addition, it suggests a novel explanation for the post-1960 decline in U.S. participation.     

Isolating the effect of compulsory voting laws on political sophistication: Leveraging intra-national variation in mandatory voting laws between the Austrian Provinces

Compulsory voting laws introduce a legal requirement to vote that substantially increases in voter turnout. Additionally, this study provides evidence that a legal requirement to vote also generates a more politically informed population. A comparative case study leverages intra-national variation in mandatory voting regulations across the Austrian Provinces over time. The analysis constructs novel measures intended to quantify recent and accumulated exposure to compulsory voting laws. The results suggest that exposure to mandatory voting laws caused Austrian citizens to increase their political interest and attention to political news, as well as their level of information about party platforms on whether or not to expand EU integration. As a whole, the study suggests that compulsory voting not only increases voter turnout; it also leads to an increase in political information.     

Place of registration and place of residence: the non-linear detrimental impact of transportation cost on electoral participation

The French case offers a very valuable opportunity for testing the impact of transportation costs on the individual decision of turnout, because in France, voters can be registered in a municipality other than their residential municipality. Voters with a non-residential registration have to travel great distances in order to cast their ballots compared to voters with a residential registration. Our empirical analysis, based on a unique dataset extracted from the French Census database, uses a selection model to estimate the probability of voting of an individual voter with a non-residential electoral registration and assesses the impact of the distance to the voting municipality on this probability. The analysis shows that distance and in fine the cost of voting have a highly significant impact on electoral turnout: at the median distance (22 km), a 1% increase in distance induces a reduction of 0.01% in turnout in the first round of the 2012 French presidential election and 0.007% in the second round. Moreover, the impact of distance is non-linear: an increase in distance for voters with a short distance to travel is more detrimental to turnout than the same increase for voters who travel great distances. The results are robust to several checks, ranging from analyzing other elections to changes in the estimation method. This analysis provides new insights in the issue of voting cost and its impact on electoral turnout.     

An Experiment Testing the Relative Effectiveness of Encouraging Voter Participation by Inducing Feelings of Pride or Shame

Prior experimental research has demonstrated that voter turnout rises substantially when people receive mailings that indicate whether they voted in previous elections. This effect suggests that voters are sensitive to whether their compliance with the norm of voting is being monitored. The present study extends this line of research by investigating whether disclosure of past participation has a stronger effect on turnout when it calls attention to a past abstention or a past vote. A sample of 369,211 registered voters who voted in just one of two recent elections were randomly assigned to receive no mail, mail that encouraged them to vote, and mail that both encouraged them to vote and indicated their turnout in one previous election. The latter type of mailing randomly reported either the election in which they voted or the one in which they abstained. Results suggest that mailings disclosing past voting behavior had strong effects on voter turnout and that these effects were significantly enhanced when it disclosed an abstention in a recent election.     

Using Experiments to Estimate the Effects of Education on Voter Turnout

The powerful relationship between education and voter turnout is arguably the most well-documented and robust finding in American survey research. Yet the causal interpretation of this relationship remains controversial, with many authors suggesting that the apparent link between education and turnout is spurious. In contrast to previous work, which has relied on observational data to assess the effect of education on voter turnout, this article analyzes two randomized experiments and one quasi-experiment in which educational attainment was altered exogenously. We track the children in these experiments over the long term, examining their voting rates as adults. In all three studies, we find that exogenously induced changes in high school graduation rates have powerful effects on voter turnout rates. These results imply that the correlation between education and turnout is indeed causal. We discuss some of the pathways by which education may transmit its influence.     

Differential Registration Bias in Voter File Data: A Sensitivity Analysis Approach

The widespread availability of voter files has improved the study of participation in American politics, but the lack of comprehensive data on nonregistrants creates difficult inferential issues. Most notably, observational studies that examine turnout rates among registrants often implicitly condition on registration, a posttreatment variable that can induce bias if the treatment of interest also affects the likelihood of registration. We introduce a sensitivity analysis to assess the potential bias induced by this problem, which we call differential registration bias. Our approach is most helpful for studies that estimate turnout among registrants using posttreatment registration data, but it is also valuable for studies that estimate turnout among the voting‐eligible population using secondary sources. We illustrate our approach with two studies of voting eligibility effects on subsequent turnout among young voters. In both cases, eligibility appears to decrease turnout, but these effects are found to be highly sensitive to differential registration bias.     

Understanding unequal turnout: Education and voting in comparative perspective

Well-educated citizens vote more frequently than the poorly educated in some countries, including the USA. However, in many countries, no such differences are observed. One classical explanation of the presence or absence of this inequality in voting is that the strength of left-wing forces sharpens or reduces it. An alternative explanation is that some institutional arrangements and contextual features disproportionately affect the voter participation of some individuals depending on their resources, thus shaping turnout inequality. These theories are tested using multilevel modeling with data from 28 advanced industrial democracies. Compulsory voting reduces inequalities because under this system quasi-universal turnout is achieved. In addition, the poorly educated vote more frequently when the voting procedure is easy and when there are few political parties, thus reducing turnout inequality. However, strong left-wing parties and trade unions are not associated with more equal turnout.     

The household effect on electoral participation. A contextual analysis of voter signatures from a French polling station (1982–2007)

We use electoral participation data coded from signature lists to show that patterns of voter turnout, be they related to average participation, versatility or precise moments of voting, are strongly related to what we call “electorate households”, i.e. groups of voters registered in the same polling station and living together. Each household tends to be homogeneous, at levels much higher than chance would explain, so that modelling individual participation without taking this household effect into account ignores much of what actually happens. The status in the household also plays an important role among individual factors of voter participation. Not only do people who live together often participate together, but the precise shape of their relationships influences their behaviour.     

Measuring the strength of voter turnout habits

Voting in one election makes a person more likely to vote in future elections. Researchers often interpret the over-time turnout persistence as evidence of psychological habit formation. But there are few theoretically motivated or empirically validated measures of voter turnout habit. This study contributes by clarifying the concept of turnout habit and developing and validating a seven-item measure of the concept. The paper describes turnout habit as a durable disposition to vote determined by an ability to automatically initiate voting and self-identify as a frequent voter. The new measure is validated using U.S. and UK survey data. Turnout data are from both voter files and self-reports. Varied methodological approaches, including a confirmatory factor analysis and receiver operator characteristic curve analysis, provide evidence of the measure's validity. Habit predicts future turnout independent of election-specific considerations, self-predictions, and age. The habit measure discriminates between eventual voters and abstainers as well as respondents' own self-predictions. Self-report voting habit measures appear valuable for answering theoretical questions about why people vote and practical questions about how best to identify likely voters in survey data.     

What is the cost of voting?

Despite a wealth of literature on the determinants of electoral turnout, little is known about the cost of voting. Some studies suggest that facilitating voting slightly increases turnout, but what ultimately matters is people's subjective perceptions of how costly voting is. This paper offers a first comprehensive analysis of the subjective cost of voting and its impact on voter turnout. We use data from an original survey conducted in Canada and data from the Making Electoral Democracy Work project which covers 23 elections among 5 different countries. We distinguish direct and information/decision voting costs. That is, the direct costs that are related to the act of voting and the costs that are related to the efforts to make (an informed) choice. We find that the cost of voting is generally perceived to be very small but that those who find voting more difficult are indeed less prone to vote, controlling for a host of other considerations. That impact, however, is relatively small, and the direct cost matters more than the information/decision cost.     

More evidence of the effects of voting technology on election outcomes

Using two different data sources—municipal level data and individual data—we consider several hitherto unexplored aspects of the relationship between voting technology and election outcomes. We distinguish between introductory and permanent effects of electronic voting, and between national and municipal elections. We test for a possible asymmetry between the effect of moving from paper ballots to electronic voting, and vice versa, and we control for polling station density. We find a positive but temporary effect of electronic voting on voter turnout, a negative effect on the fraction of residual votes, and no effect on the share of left wing parties.     

Who is responsible? The effect of clarity of responsibility on voter turnout

Does voters’ ability to discern who is responsible for policy outcomes affect voter turnout? Although particular institutional arrangements which influence this ability – known as clarity of responsibility – appear to affect how voters form retrospective judgements, existing literature is less informed about its role on voter turnout. This article argues that voters tend to turn out less if they cannot discern who is responsible for policy outcomes. This lack of clarity hinders the process of retrospective evaluations, makes the electoral stakes less profound, and dampens the voters’ political efficacy. Using 396 elections in 34 established democracies between 1960 and 2015, it is found that lower clarity of responsibility is associated with lower voter turnout. This study highlights the importance of clarity of responsibility, as it enhances democratic accountability, not only by encouraging retrospective voting, but also by increasing political participation.