Increase In Turnout Research Articles

The Defeat of Stephen Harper: A Case Study in Social Movement Electoralism

This article aims to identify the key electoral dynamics of the 2015 federal election in Canada, an election which ended 10 years of Conservative rule and propelled the Liberals to office, under new leader Justin Trudeau. It suggests, building on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, that social movement electoralism—motivated by a strong anti-Tory sentiment—best captures the phenomenon of millions of new voters arriving at the ballot box. Using comparative data at a national, regional, and riding level, the article posits that the 2015 election witnessed an unprecedented increase in voter turnout, an increase that disproportionately benefitted the Liberals. Activist-driven strategic voting can only account for a small proportion of this turn to the Liberals, and the article introduces a Hypothetical Strategic Voting Test to make this point. The social movement electoralism framework has implications not just for our understanding of this and future elections, but for our understanding of the nature of contemporary democracy itself.

Coattails and the forces that drive them: Evidence from Mexico

Coattails and the forces behind them have important implications for the understanding of electoral processes and their outcomes. By focusing our attention on neighboring electoral sections that face the same local congressional election, but different municipal elections, and assuming that political preferences for local legislative candidates remain constant across neighboring electoral sections, we exploit variation in the strength of the municipal candidates in each of these electoral sections to estimate coattails from municipal to local congressional elections in Mexico. A one percentage increase in vote share for a municipal candidate translates, depending on his or her party, into an average of between 0.45 and 0.78 percentage point increase in vote share for the legislative candidates from the same party (though this effect may not have been sufficient to affect an outcome in any electoral district in our sample). In addition, we find that a large fraction of the effect is driven by individuals switching their vote decision in the legislative election, rather than by an increase in turnout.

The Brennan–Lomasky Test of Expressive Voting: When Impressive Probability Differences Are Meaningless

We consider a test of expressive voting developed by Brennan and Lomasky (1993). They point out that in presidential elections the probability of a tie, and casting a decisive vote, increases “multi-billionfold” as the election becomes increasingly close. They conjecture that if voters are instrumentally motivated there would be enormous increases in voter turnout for presidential elections as they became close. When they find no consistent relationship between closeness and turnout in presidential elections since 1940, they conclude their test justifies a “decisive rejection of the instrumental voter hypothesis.” As dramatic as such a “multi-billionfold” increase is, we argue it would not motivate voting if an instrumental payoff was the only motivation for doing so. The Brennan–Lomasky test does give the correct result, but not for the reason they emphasize. They do see reasons why voting turnout would be moderated other than the dramatic probability of a decisive vote in close elections. Furthermore, they close their test by indicating that one reason turnout might be higher in close elections is that they are more interesting, which is congenial to an expressive account. We agree. We also argue that the observed tendency for voters to confirm their biases rather than change their minds provides additional support for expressive voting.

Race, Ethnicity, the Political Incorporation of Black Immigrants: an Examination of Evidence from Presidential Elections Won by Barack Obama

This study uses data from the Voter Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine the implications of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections for the political incorporation of Black immigrants. Our results show that these elections were associated with larger increases in turnout among Black immigrants compared to Asian, Hispanic, and White immigrants. In the first and third-plus generations, we find a reversal in the Black-White disparity in voting patterns between the 2004 presidential election won by George Bush and the subsequent elections won by Barack Obama. Our analysis further provides a nuanced picture of the historical overall increases in Black turnout observed during the election of Barack Obama. In other words, we show that these increases were mostly driven by higher turnout among third-plus generation, US-born Blacks and first-generation African immigrants. While increases in turnout were observed among second-generation Africans and first and second-generation immigrants from the Caribbean, our results indicate that they were not statistically significant. Overall, our findings imply that the election of America’s first Black president was associated with notable increases in political participation among Black immigrants, but that these increases varied across Black immigrant groups.

Core and Peripheral Voters: Predictors of Turnout Across Three Types of Elections

Citizens who abstain from voting in consecutive elections and inequality in turnout in democratic elections constitute a challenge to the legitimacy of democracy. Applying the law of dispersion, which stipulates higher levels of turnout and higher levels of equality in turnout are positively related, we study turnout patterns across different types of elections in Denmark, a high-turnout European context. Across three different elections with turnout rates from 56.3% to 85.9%, we use a rich, nationwide panel dataset of 2.1 million citizens with validated turnout and high-quality sociodemographic variables. A total of 9% of the citizens are abstainers in the three consecutive elections, and these are disproportionately male, of non-Western ethnic background, with little education, and with low income. The law of dispersion finds support as inequalities in turnout increase when turnout decreases and vice versa. Furthermore, municipalities with lower turnout have higher inequalities in participation than high-turnout municipalities in local elections.

Does Higher Turnout Hurt Incumbents? An Analysis of State Elections in India

Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in voter turnout hurts incumbents in Indian elections. This belief has become a central feature of how analysts discuss Indian voter behaviour. Yet there are few systematic analyses of the relationship between turnout and incumbent performance. To fill this gap, we analysed a dataset of elections in India’s 18 major states between 1980 and 2012. Our analyses show that an increase in turnout, relative to the prior election, has no statistically meaningful relationship with three measures of an incumbent government’s electoral performance. While the belief about the anti-incumbent nature of rising turnout is widely held, it does not appear to be supported by the data.

The Effect of the Voting Rights Act on Enfranchisement: Evidence from North Carolina

Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions—those deemed perniciously politically discriminatory to minorities—to preclear changes to their voting practices with the Department of Justice. By exploiting the use of a federally imposed threshold for how Section 5 coverage was applied in North Carolina, this article estimates the effect of coverage using a difference-in-differences design. This article finds that Section 5 coverage increased black voter registration by 14–19 percentage points, white registration by 10–13 percentage points, and overall voter turnout by 10–19 percentage points. Additional results for Democratic vote share suggest that some of this overall increase in turnout may have come from reactionary whites. This article finds that Section 5 coverage had a statistically and substantively meaningful effect on enfranchisement, although an effect consistent with the more modest of extant estimates in the literature.

Learning from the other side: how social networks influence turnout in a referendum campaign

Interpersonal discussion is considered to be one of the most influential sources of opinion formation and behaviour. Yet, an unresolved puzzle remains within the literature: while some studies show that discussion with not like-minded citizens depresses political participation, other studies, on the contrary, indicate that the same type of interpersonal discussion can foster political engagement. In this study, we address this unresolved democratic dilemma for the first time in a context of direct democracy, by focussing on the campaign leading to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum. Specifically, we pay particular attention to the interaction between network diversity, ambivalence, and political knowledge. The findings show that frequent interactions with not like-minded citizens increase turnout. The results based on regression models and structural equation modelling indicate that this positive effect is channelled mainly through political learning, since network diversity increases factual knowledge about the constitutional reform, which in turn is associated with an increase in turnout. We do not find a significant effect of network diversity on ambivalence, as predicted by previous studies. These findings have important implications for deliberative theories and campaign strategies.

Was Obama Elected by the Internet? Broadband Diffusion and Voters' Behavior in US Presidential Elections

What are the political consequences of the diffusion of broadband internet? We address this question by studying the 2008 US presidential election, the first political campaign where the internet played a key role. Drawing on data from the FEC and the FCC, we provide robust evidence that internet penetration in US counties is associated with an increase in turnout, an increase in campaign contributions to the Democrats and an increase in the share of Democratic vote. We then propose an IV strategy to deal with potential endogeneity concerns: we exploit geographic discontinuities along state borders with different right-of-way laws, which constitute the main determinant of the cost of building new infrastructure. IV estimates confirm a positive impact of broadband diffusion on turnout, while the pro-Democratic Party effect of the internet appears to be less robust.

The Impact of Medicaid Expansion on Voter Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and state administrative data on voter behavior, we analyze how a Medicaid expansion affected voter turnout and registration. We find that Medicaid increased voter turnout in the November 2008 Presidential election by about 7 percent overall, with the effects concentrated in men (18 percent increase) and in residents of democratic counties (10 percent increase); there is suggestive evidence that the increase in voting reflected new voter registrations, rather than increased turnout among pre-existing registrants. There is no evidence of an increase in voter turnout in subsequent elections, up to and including the November 2010 midterm election.

On public opinion polls and voters' turnout

AbstractThis paper studies the effects that the revelation of information on the electorate's preferences has on voters' turnout. The experimental data show that closeness in the division of preferences induces a significant increase in turnout. Moreover, for closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates), the provision of information significantly raises the participation of subjects supporting the slightly larger team relative to the smaller team. We show that the heterogeneous effect of information on the participation of subjects in different teams is driven by the subjects' (incorrect) beliefs of casting a pivotal vote. Simply put, subjects overestimate the probability of casting a pivotal vote when they belong to the team with a slight majority, and choose the strategy that maximizes their utility based on their inflated probability assessment. Empirical evidence on gubernatorial elections in the United States between 1990 and 2005 is consistent with our main experimental result. Namely, we observe that the difference in the actual vote tally between the party leading according to the polls and the other party is larger than the one predicted by the polls only in closely divided electorates. We provide a behavioral model that explains the main findings of our experimental and empirical analyses.

The elasticity of voter turnout: Investing 85 cents per voter to increase voter turnout by 4 percent

In the aftermath of elections or ballots, the legitimacy of the result is regularly debated if voter turnout was considered to be low. Hence, discussions about legal reforms to increase turnout are common in most democracies. We analyze the impact of a very small change in voting costs on voter turnout. Some municipalities in the Swiss Canton of Bern reduced voting costs by prepaying the postage of the return envelope (CHF 0.85). Prepaid postage is associated with a statistically significant 1.8 percentage points increase in voter turnout. Overall, this amounts to 4 percent more voters participating in the ballots. Moreover, we estimate the influence of this increase in turnout on party support in popular ballots. We find that social democrats and environmentalists see their relative support decline.

Natural Disasters and Political Engagement: Evidence from the 2010011 Pakistani Floods

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to climate change. Research in sociology and psychology suggests traumatic events can inspire pro-social behavior and therefore might increase political engagement. Research in political science argues that economic resources are critical for political engagement and thus the economic dislocation from disasters may dampen participation. We argue that when the government and civil society response effectively blunts a disaster’s economic impacts, then political engagement may increase as citizens learn about government capacity. Using diverse data from the massive 2010–11 Pakistan floods, we find that Pakistanis in highly flood-affected areas turned out to vote at substantially higher rates three years later than those less exposed. We also provide speculative evidence on the mechanism. The increase in turnout was higher in areas with lower ex ante flood risk, which is consistent with a learning process. These results suggest that natural disasters may not necessarily undermine civil society in emerging developing democracies.

Expanding Medicaid, Expanding the Electorate: The Affordable Care Act's Short-Term Impact on Political Participation.

The Affordable Care Act is a landmark piece of social legislation with the potential to reshape health care in the United States. Its potential to reshape politics is also considerable, but existing scholarship suggests conflicting expectations about the law's policy feedbacks, especially given uneven state-level implementation. In this article I focus on the policy feedbacks of the law's Medicaid expansion on political participation, using district-level elections data for 2012 and 2014 US House races and cross-sectional survey data from 2014. I find that the increases in Medicaid enrollment associated with the expansion are related to considerably higher voter turnout and that this effect was likely due to both an increase in turnout for new beneficiaries and a backlash effect among conservative voters opposed to the law and its implementation. These results have important implications for our understanding of the ACA and of the impact of welfare state expansions on political participation, particularly in federalized systems.

Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italyn Municipal Elections

Abstract We analyze the impact that the educational level of candidates running for the position of mayor has on electoral turnout by using a large dataset for Italyn municipal elections held between 1993 and 2011. We firstly estimate a municipality fixed effects model and show that the median education of candidates standing in an election is positively correlated with turnout. To handle endogeneity issues arising from the unobservable time variant features of electoral races, we build on the literature which shows that politicians’ educational level is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design on the basis of the fact that the wages of mayors in Italy increase non-monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous increase in the median educational level of candidates, induced by a higher wage, leads to an increase in turnout of about 1 percentage point.

Paying Postage: Estimating the Elasticity of Voter Turnout

We aim to estimate the elasticity of voter turnout. We analyze how voters react to a change in voting costs. Some municipalities in the canton of Berne reduced voting costs by paying the postage of the return envelope when voters opt for postal voting. We find that paying the postage is associated with a statistically significant 1.8 percentage point increase in voter turnout. This increase in turnout negatively affects the alignment of voters with leftist party positions.

Russia's 1999–2000 Election Cycle and the Politics-Banking Interface

We investigate whether lending by the dominant Russian state bank, Sberbank, contributed to Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power during the presidential elections of March 2000. Our hypothesis is that Sberbank corporate loans could have been used as incentives for managers at private firms to mobilize employees to vote for the incumbent regime. In line with our proposed voter mobilization mechanism, we find that the regional growth of Sberbank corporate loans in the months before the presidential election is related to the regional increase in votes for Putin and to the regional increase in voter turnout between the Duma election of December 1999 and the presidential election of March 2000. The effect of Sberbank firm lending on Putin votes was most pronounced in regions where the governor was affiliated with the regime and in regions with extensive private employment. The effect was less apparent in regions with many single-company towns, where voter intimidation is sufficient to get the required result. Additional robustness checks and placebo regressions confirm the main findings. Our results support the view that additional Sberbank corporate loans granted prior to the March 2000 presidential election facilitated Putin’s early electoral success.

Vanquished Warrior: Reconsidering Al Smith’s 1928 New York Defeat

Vanquished Warrior: Reconsidering Al Smith’s 1928 New York Defeat Robert Chiles (bio) In 1928, New York Governor Alfred E. Smith not only lost the presidential election in a landslide, he also lost his home state by a slim margin—a particularly heartbreaking end to a political career that had included four statewide triumphs in the preceding ten years. Historians have reflexively ascribed this outcome to traditional upstate/downstate divides—especially anti-Catholic and anti-urban voting by rural New Yorkers. It is a story, we have been told, about regional political identity. Yet closer scrutiny of statewide voting patterns undercuts such explanations.1 County-level voting trends from the 1920s reveal that Smith’s 1928 defeat in New York State was not the result of a surge in anti-Catholic rural voting. Instead, the man Franklin D. Roosevelt dubbed “the Happy Warrior” was thwarted by an inability to garner the sort of overwhelming support in New York City that had allowed him to overcome upstate Republican strength in the past—particularly in 1924, when he was reelected governor despite a Republican presidential landslide in the Empire State. Furthermore, voting patterns in New York City—particularly in the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, where Smith’s performance was markedly weaker than during his gubernatorial bids—suggest that Smith’s inability to retain the allegiance of progressive New York City Republicans played an important role in his 1928 defeat. From the national and presidential perspective, Al Smith’s 1928 sweep of New York City, especially his large margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx, was unprecedented for a Democratic nominee and augured a new voting pattern with the potential to yield regular Democratic statewide pluralities. [End Page 90] Yet Smith’s success in the five boroughs was obviously not personally unprecedented, for he had always carried New York City by spectacular margins. Therefore, historians have assumed that his defeat in New York State in 1928 was delivered largely by upstate voters, many of whom had never supported the Happy Warrior, and others of whom evidently considered the notion of having a Roman Catholic Tammany man from Manhattan’s Lower East Side move onto Pennsylvania Avenue less tolerable than that of having such a character reside on Eagle Street. “Upstate nativists and antisaloon advocates came out in droves to keep the wet Catholic out of the White House,” affirmed Terry Golway in a recent history of Tammany Hall; while Smith biographer Robert Slayton has concluded: “In New York State, outside the city . . . voters could not accept the vision of this kind of man in the White House, despite his record as their governor.”2 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. 1928 two-party presidential vote Upstate and in New York City. A closer inspection of statewide voting statistics complicates this narrative. Smith lost New York State in 1928 by just over 103,000 votes, 51 percent to 49 percent. He carried New York City by a margin of nearly 454,000, and lost outside of the city by over 557,000. All of which seems to comport with the argument that it was “upstate” (along with on Long Island) where Smith was defeated.3 Yet Al Smith had won four statewide [End Page 91] races in his career, never having carried the upstate vote. The difference in 1928 was that his success in New York City was not enough to overcome his deficit north of the Bronx and east of Queens. Trends and Precedents Al Smith had lost New York State once before—in 1920, when his first attempt at gubernatorial reelection was narrowly thwarted by Judge Nathan Miller of Syracuse in a result that historians have always attributed to national politics and the concomitant increase in upstate turnout and Republican presidential enthusiasm.4 In that election, Smith won New York City by nearly 320,000 and lost outside the five boroughs by 396,700. This election was much closer than the 1928 presidential contest—the margin of defeat in 1920 was a little more than half that of 1928. Yet Smith’s percentage outside of New York City was nearly the same (in fact it was...

The Impact of State Television on Voter Turnout

In an influential study, Matthew Gentzkow found that the introduction of TV in the United States caused a major drop in voter turnout. In contrast, the current analysis shows that public broadcasting TV can increase political participation. Detailed data on the rollout of television in Norway in the 1960s and 1970s are combined with municipality-level data on voter turnout over a period of four decades. The date of access to TV signals was mostly a side effect of geography, a feature that is used to identify causal effects. Additional analyses exploit individual-level panel data from three successive election studies. The new TV medium instantly became a major source of political information. It triggered political interest and caused a modest, but statistically significant, increase in voter turnout.

The Efficacy of Political Advertising: A Voter Participation Field Experiment with Multiple Robo Calls and Controls for Selection Effects

We document the effectiveness of robo calls for increasing voter participation despite most published research finding little or no effect of automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment in a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our experimental design includes a follow-up call, which allows us to control for selection effects. We identify subsets of subjects, for whom the treatment effects are substantially larger than those that are found in previous studies. Our findings show that robo calls can cause up to a one percentage point increase in voter turnout. Additionally, our experimental design allows for testing how the number of calls in a treatment, that is dosage, affects voter turnout. Here, results show that that a few extra calls increase the treatment effect, and that many additional calls decrease that effect.