Benefits Of Voting Research Articles

A National Voter Registration Campaign.

Research suggests that increased voting among adults is associated with improved child health. Despite the benefits of voting, the United States has low voter turnout compared with peer nations. Turnout is especially low among marginalized people in the United States. Voter registration is essential for increasing voter turnout, and registration efforts have been successfully carried out in clinical settings. Working with a nonprofit called Vot-ER, we advocated for nonpartisan voter registration efforts in pediatric settings nationwide preceding the November 2020 US elections. We describe lessons learned from these efforts. Using data obtained from Vot-ER, we also provide the first estimates of participation in a national voter registration campaign in pediatric settings. There was widespread engagement in voter registration efforts among pediatricians in 2020. Many lessons were learned from these efforts, including the benefits of advanced planning because registration deadlines can be up to 1 month in advance of Election Day. Obtaining buy-in from numerous stakeholders (e.g., health center leadership, public relations teams) supports widespread staff participation. Also important is to consider the tradeoffs between active voter registration (in which staff can broach the topic of voting with patients and families) and passive efforts (in which voting is discussed only if patients or families inquire about it). These and other lessons can inform future voter registration efforts in diverse pediatric settings across the country.

Psychiatry's Obligation to Promote Voting Among Patients With Mental Illness.

The American Medical Association adopted a resolution in June 2022 recognizing voting as a social determinant of health. As psychiatric professionals and trainees with experience in civic health, the authors argue that psychiatrists must consider the relationship between voting and mental health as part of care delivery. People with psychiatric illness can experience unique barriers to voting and garner mental health benefits from civic engagement. Provider-led activities to promote voting are accessible and simple. Given the benefits of voting, and the availability of interventions to foster voter engagement, psychiatrists have an obligation to promote voting access among their patients.

FACTORS OF ELECTORAL (NON) PARTICIPATION OF CITIZENS IN THE CONTEXT OF RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

The article is devoted to the study of the factors of electoral (non)participation of citizens in the context of the theory of rational choice. The author pays the main attention to the variables that make it possible to calculate the potential effectiveness of voting for a particular citizen, including the probability of the decisive vote, benefits from voting, and losses from voting. The author emphasizes that, according to the theory of rational choice, citizens make simple calculations to determine whether it is appropriate to vote, taking into account the abovementioned variables. According to the model of rational choice, for the vast majority of citizens, voting is completely irrational, since the weight of one vote is insignificant, the benefits of voting are negligible, and the costs are quite significant. However, most voters spend the resources to show up at the polling station on polling day and cast their own single vote for their preferred candidate. In this case, the paradox of voting arises and the limitations of the theory of rational choice are revealed. The author highlights that several additions or variations of the theory have been presented by the scientific community. In particular, among them, the positive decision to vote is explained by the desire to support the functioning of democratic processes; a sense of civic duty; a desire to minimize maximum losses; faith in the decisive vote; mobilization efforts of politicians; minimal expenses for the voter; a conviction that calculations are impractical. Each amendment is characterized by both advantages for understanding electoral behavior in the context of the theory, and disadvantages, which often come down to ignoring the fundamental variables of the theory and giving the psycho-emotional factor an exceptionally prominent place. The author points out that a reassessment of the initial values of the theory, namely the probability that the single vote will become decisive and the cost of the spent voter`s resources, can lead to a completely new interpretation of the theory and scientific results.

Theoretically, yes, but also empirically? How the corruption-turnout link is marginally explained by civic duty to vote

Corruption is generally associated with low electoral participation. A recurrent explanation of the negative correlation between corruption and electoral turnout involves the rational calculus of the costs and benefits of voting. More specifically, in a context of high corruption, citizens do not vote because they think that doing so will hardly affect policy decisions. A number of influential studies has argued that corruption affects citizens' electoral engagement in a different and more fundamental way as well: It erodes their sense of civic duty to vote in elections. Yet, a relation between corruption and civic duty and a mediation effect of the attitude remains empirically untested. This article examines empirically whether perceived corruption and sense of civic duty are correlated, as well as whether civic duty mediates the relation between perceived corruption and turnout. It does so with the pooled Making Electoral Democracy Work data, as these data contain measures on individuals’ sense of civic duty to vote in four election levels, namely, national, regional, European, and municipal elections, as well as on their perception of corruption in each of these government levels, and on their participation in these four election levels as well. I find a weak relation between perceived corruption and civic duty, and a low mediation effect of the attitude (compared with rational factors), irrespective of the election level.

Explaining (non) participation in overseas voting: the case of overseas Filipino voters in Japan in the 2016 elections

ABSTRACT This study explains the low Overseas Voting (OV) participation among Filipino migrants, by examining OV in Japan in the 2016 elections. Feddersen and Sandroni’s ([2006]. “A Theory of Participation in Elections.” American Economic Review 96 (4): 1271–1282. doi:10.1257/aer.96.4.1271) rational model of electoral participation is adopted to produce evidence-based claims on why OV among Filipino migrants in Japan is low. By examining the perceived benefits, costs, and sense of citizen duty of the overseas Filipinos vis-à-vis their physical absence from their (imagined) homeland, this study shows that voting costs overwhelm the benefits of voting and migrants tend to exercise their citizenship through other means. The low electoral participation of overseas Filipinos is not a manifestation of the loss of allegiance to the homeland nor political disinterest. Rather, voting is not seen as an urgent need nor a responsibility as an overseas national, albeit acknowledged as a civic duty. These have important implications for improving OV participation among Filipinos and other diaspora communities that chronically have low electoral participation.

Free-Riders and Underdogs: Participation in Corporate Voting

Voting outcomes can differ from underlying preferences due to selection into voting. One source of such selection is lower participation of shareholders with popular preferences (free-rider effect) relative to that of those with unpopular preferences (underdog effect). We illustrate these strategic effects in a rational choice model in which the voting participation decision depends on the probability of being pivotal and the costs and benefits of voting. Based on the model, we structurally estimate unobservable shareholder preferences in US data. We show that strategic selection into voting is relevant: 13% of voting outcomes in shareholder governance proposals represent the minority.

Every team deserves a second chance: an extended study on predicting team performance

Voting among different agents is a powerful tool in problem solving, and it has been widely applied to improve the performance in finding the correct answer to complex problems. We present a novel benefit of voting, that has not been observed before: we can use the voting patterns to assess the performance of a team and predict their final outcome. This prediction can be executed at any moment during problem-solving and it is completely domain independent. Hence, it can be used to identify when a team is failing, allowing an operator to take remedial procedures (such as changing team members, the voting rule, or increasing the allocation of resources). We present three main theoretical results: (1) we show a theoretical explanation of why our prediction method works; (2) contrary to what would be expected based on a simpler explanation using classical voting models, we show that we can make accurate predictions irrespective of the strength (i.e., performance) of the teams, and that in fact, the prediction can work better for diverse teams composed of different agents than uniform teams made of copies of the best agent; (3) we show that the quality of our prediction increases with the size of the action space. We perform extensive experimentation in two different domains: Computer Go and Ensemble Learning. In Computer Go, we obtain high quality predictions about the final outcome of games. We analyze the prediction accuracy for three different teams with different levels of diversity and strength, and show that the prediction works significantly better for a diverse team. Additionally, we show that our method still works well when trained with games against one adversary, but tested with games against another, showing the generality of the learned functions. Moreover, we evaluate four different board sizes, and experimentally confirm better predictions in larger board sizes. We analyze in detail the learned prediction functions, and how they change according to each team and action space size. In order to show that our method is domain independent, we also present results in Ensemble Learning, where we make online predictions about the performance of a team of classifiers, while they are voting to classify sets of items. We study a set of classical classification algorithms from machine learning, in a data-set of hand-written digits, and we are able to make high-quality predictions about the final performance of two different teams. Since our approach is domain independent, it can be easily applied to a variety of other domains.

Voting tools to support convergence process in collaboration

Engineers, like others working in group settings, face several challenges in collaboration. One of the challenges is converging to a final decision. Group support systems (GSS) can support engineers in making decisions. GSS researchers and facilitators of group meetings recognise that implementing convergence processes in groups is a most demanding task. Voting, when used properly, can be a great aid in the convergence process. To reap the full benefit of voting in group decision, the computation and communication capabilities in GSS must be used when building voting tools. In this paper, we describe the functional requirements of sophisticated voting tools for collaboration based on prevailing theories and the functionality of existing voting tools. These considerations can serve as guidelines for the design and development of the next generation voting tools. Engineers, like others working in group settings, face several challenges in collaboration. One of the challenges is converging to a final decision. Group support systems (GSS) can support engineers in making decisions. GSS researchers and facilitators of group meetings recognise that implementing convergence processes in groups is a most demanding task. Voting, when used properly, can be a great aid in the convergence process. To reap the full benefit of voting in group decision, the computation and communication capabilities in GSS must be used when building voting tools. In this paper, we describe the functional requirements of sophisticated voting tools for collaboration based on prevailing theories and the functionality of existing voting tools. These considerations can serve as guidelines for the design and development of the next generation voting tools.

Get Out The Vote: How Encouraging Voting Changes Political Outcomes

How do measures to increase turnout affect election outcomes? I use a novel approach to analyze how these measures influence both voter turnout and the candidates' political positions. In general, lowering the net expense of voting reduces political polarization. If the net expense of voting is made very low, then candidates no longer have an incentive to take partisan positions to motivate turnout and will converge at the median voter's ideal point. For small changes in the net expense of voting, however, decreasing the cost of voting and penalties for not voting (two common measures) can result in drastically different political outcomes. Counter intuitively, measures that make voting cheaper might not increase turnout: since these measures decrease the difference between the candidates' political positions, they also decrease the benefit of voting.

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Uncovering the micro-foundations of turnout and electoral systems

This paper tackles the micro-foundations of voting and addresses why proportional representation systems (PR) are associated with higher turnout than majoritarian systems (SMD). I argue that individual evaluations of the differential benefit in the calculus of voting are affected by spatial party competition framed by electoral institutions. Unlike PR, SMD constrains the number of parties and creates large centripetal forces for party competition, which reduces the perceived benefits of voting. A citizen’s voting propensity is related to the distance between her preferred policy position and those of her most- and least-favored parties. I use multilevel modeling to analyze individual voting decisions structured by aggregate variables across 64 elections. The empirical findings confirm the argument and the mechanism holds both in established and non-established democracies.

Acting on the Intent to Vote: A Voter Turnout Experiment

Theories of voter turnout have focused almost exclusively on the costs and benefits of voting, even though one potentially important aspect of turnout is what takes place after a citizen has decided she intends to vote but before she arrives at the polls. I test two social psychology theories affecting this process: self-prophecy and implementation intentions. The self-prophecy effect occurs when an individual is asked to predict whether he will vote, and this act of prediction alters his future behavior by making him more likely to vote. Applying the implementation intentions theory to voting, citizens would be more likely to vote if they focused on the concrete actions involved in getting to the polling location rather than simply on the end-state of having voted. The field experiment consisted of phone calls to 5,609 registered voters with scripts intended to test these theories. Neither treatment generates a statistically significant result, which undermines the reliability of very large effects found in prior research on voting self-prophecy effects, and suggests the impact of implementation intentions may be limited with respect to voting.

Does Direct Democracy Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence from the 2004 General Election

Abstract. This empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the “rational voter model” so as to include the potential effects of “direct democracy” on the voter participation rate. Direct democracy is assumed to take two forms: initiatives and popular referenda. This study tests the hypothesis that direct democracy may not on balance significantly affect voter turnout because, although it may elevate the expected gross benefits of voting by “empowering voters,” the transactions/information costs correlative with direct democracy raise the costs of voting. Using cross‐section analysis for the 50 states for the 2004 general election, this study finds that the existence of initiatives and/or referenda does not significantly influence voter turnout.

Influence of the Number of Statewide Referenda Involving Emotionally-Charged Issues on Voter Turnout, 2006

The issue of same-sex marriage is an emotionally charged one. So is the issue of abortion. This is true to the point where it has resulted in several cases in the placement of statewide referenda on the ballot for voter approval or disapproval. This study tests the hypothesis that greater numbers of such emotionally charged referenda may increase voter turnout because they may elevate the expected gross benefits of voting by empowering “interested voters” while not significantly increasing the expected gross costs of voting. Using state-level data for all 50 states for the 2006 general election, and after allowing for a variety of economic and demographic factors, this study finds compelling evidence that the numbers of statewide referenda dealing with same-sex marriage and abortion did in fact significantly increase voter turnout.

The Poll Results Hypothesis

This empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the rational voter model so as to reflect the potential impact of the results of polls of likely voters’ Presidential candidate preferences on the expected benefits of voting and hence on the voter participation rate. This study introduces the poll results hypothesis: in any given state, given the existence of the Electoral College, the greater the lead of a principal Presidential candidate over his/her closest rival as revealed in polls of likely voters, the lower, for at least some portion of prospective voters, the expected gross benefits of voting in that state and hence the lower the aggregate voter participation rate in that state. In a cross-section study of the 50 states during the 2004 general election, it is found, after allowing for a variety of other factors, that the greater the lead (as revealed in polls of likely voters) of either of the principal Presidential candidates over the other in any given state, the lower the voter turnout rate in that state.

11. William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook. 1968. “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.” American Political Science Review 62 (March): 25–42 Cited 377 times.

The initial motive for writing “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting” was not the argument that subsequently became the focus of academic discussion, the necessity for positing a D term (“citizen duty”) to render the act of voting rational. Instead, our purpose was to show that people reacted “rationally” (i.e., logically) to an election's competitiveness. Admittedly the data we brought to bear here were weak, but with the addition of D the question arose as to whether we made voting rational only by rendering the concept of rationality a tautology: rational people voted because, with D, we assumed they were rational. However, one response with which I am sure Riker would agree is to note an asymmetry in our thinking about social processes. Few people claim to eat for a reason other than satisfying their own (private) needs as opposed facilitating the (public) objective of diminishing world hunger, and positing a growling tummy as a reason for entering a restaurant is hardly taken as a instance of rationality turned tautology. Yet the argument that the benefits of voting are dominated by a private D term as opposed to some public PB calculation occasions precisely that accusation.

Vindicating Anthony Downs

Positive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” (Knack 1992, 133). Green and Shapiro (1994), whose scathing critique of the rational choice field centers on the work of Anthony Downs (1957), trenchantly put it: “Rational choice theorists have trotted out an astonishing variety of conjectures about the costs and benefits of voting, in the process generating an enormous literature, possibly larger in terms of academic citations and sheer bibliographic length than any other rational choice literature in American politics” (47–48), yet they still have no answer as to why people vote when, according to their arguments, reason says they ought not. Grofman (1993), paraphrasing Morris Fiorina, has referred to the failure of rational choice theory to explain turnout as the “paradox that ate rational choice.” We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.

What We Should Know about the Effectiveness of Campaigns but Don’t

It would be useful as well as interesting to understand more about why people decide to vote. The theoretical literature suggests that they weigh the costs and benefits of voting and also consider the moral obligation to participate. Relevant empirical evidence comes from surveys, comparisons of states with differing laws and electoral processes, and randomized field studies of voter mobilization efforts. The randomized experiments are by far the most rigorous sources, and they have yielded some insights about why people choose to vote or not to vote. However, much remains to be investigated, and this article provides a research agenda.

The Contingent Effects of Ballot Initiatives and Candidate Races on Turnout

This study analyzes the potential of campaigns for ballot measures and elected offices to draw to the polls citizens who otherwise would not vote. The salience of initiatives and popular referenda in each U.S. state is measured for general elections from 1972 to 1996. Using a pooled time-series cross-sectional data set, a model of state-level turnout is estimated. Distinguishing between midterm and presidential years, the analysis tests for the effects of campaigns across those two kinds of contexts. Contrary to previous studies finding no effects at all for ballot initiatives, the results indicate that these measures-like gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns-provide a boost to turnout during midterm years but not presidential years. Highsalience initiatives and popular referenda are estimated to increase turnout by about four points during midterm elections, as compared to effects for closely contested gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns of four points and three points, respectively. he long-standing debate over the desirability of letting voters decide upon initiatives and popular referenda has intensified in recent years. Supporters claim that ballot measures strengthen democracy and create a more engaged citizenry, ultimately boosting election-day turnout (Schmidt 1989; Zimmerman 1986). A variety of activists, political consultants, journalists, and elected officials make similar assertions (Barabak 1998; National Journal's Congress Daily 1998). Yet it is likely that initiatives and referenda vary in their ability to increase voter participation. Some propositions are marked by extensive media coverage, vigorous campaigns, and high awareness among voters, while others rank low on each of these dimensions. The rational choice approach to turnout provides a theoretical framework for expecting the former kinds of measures to exert a stronger effect on turnout than the latter ones. Riker and Ordeshook (1968), extending the work of Downs (1957), propose that an individual's decision to vote depends positively upon the benefits-the probability of affecting the outcome times the utility gained if the preferred candidate wins-and negatively upon the costs. As for the benefits, it is the most salient initiatives and referenda for which citizens will perceive the greatest differences from voting one way over the other. After all, when an individual knows and cares little about a ballot proposition, his or her perceived utility won't change much regardless of the outcome. Thus, the initiatives and referenda with the highest public salience should show the strongest relationship with turnout because of their impacts upon the benefits of voting. Examining the cost side of the ledger also leads to the expectation that the most salient ballot measures produce the largest increase in turnout. The costs of voting, which include gathering information, fall as voters can acquire it without exerting much effort. Highly salient measuresthose attracting voluminous media attention and lively campaigns-have lower costs than low-visibility measures for which citizens must seek out facts and arguments. By holding down the costs, the presence of salient

Rational Abstention and the Congressional Vote Choice

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators’ decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.