Turnout Rates Research Articles

Election Turnout Inequality - Insights from Administrative Registers

Using matched administrative election data from Norway, we document gender-specific turnout rates by a range of socio-economic outcomes as well as family relationships and immigrant status. High social rank is consistently associated with higher turnout: we find significant turnout gradients for education, occupational prestige, income, wealth, and parental economic resources during childhood. Turnout among spouses, parents and children, as well as siblings and cousins, are highly correlated, showing strong influences of family factors. Immigrant turnout falls far below that of natives of similar age, even many years after arrival. Turnout among children of immigrants is more similar to that of natives, indicating political integration across but not within generations. Election turnout inequality implies that voters differ from the electorate at large along a number of socio-economic dimensions; we find that such misalignment is similar to that observed in the US.

Estimation of the Percent of the Vote by Adjustment of Voter Turnout in Election Polls

유권자들의 올바른 투표행위에 기여하기 위하여 또는 후보나 정당의 적절한 선거전략 수립을 위하여, 선거여론조사를 통하여 신뢰성 있고 객관적인 정보를 확보하는 것은 매우 중요한 문제이다. 따라서 정당, 언론기관, 조사회사 등 관련 기관에서는 여론조사의 결과와 선거예측의 정확도 향상을 위해 지속적으로 노력해 왔다. Kim et al.(2017)에서는 선거여론조사에서 지지후보가 없다고 응답한 무응답층을 분류하여 득표율 예측의 정확도를 높일 수 있는지를 분석하였는데, 결과적으로 무응답층에 대하여 적절한 분류를 수행함으로써 득표율 추정의 정확도를 상당히 높일 수 있음을 확인한 바 있다. 본 연구에서는 특정 선거구(지역)에 대하여 전체 투표율이 주어져 있다는 조건 하에서 각 층(성, 연령대)별 투표율을 추정하는 방안을 제안하고, 투표율을 반영하여 득표율을 예측하는 절차를 제시하였다. 또한 2016년 20대 국회의원선거에 대한 여론조사에서 전화면접조사를 통해 얻어진 자료를 사용하여 사례 분석을 수행하였다.It is very important to obtain objective and credible information through election polls in order to contribute to the correct voting behavior of the voters or to establish appropriate election strategies for candidates or political parties. Therefore, many related organizations such as political parties, media organizations, and research institutions have been making efforts to improve the accuracy of the results of the polls and the election prediction. Kim et al. (2017) analyzed whether the non-response group responded that there is no support candidate in the election survey to increase the accuracy of the estimation of the vote rate. As a result, it has been confirmed that the accuracy of the estimation of the vote rate can be significantly improved by performing an appropriate classification on the non-response layer. In this study, we propose a method to estimate the turnout by each strata (sex, age group) under the condition that the total turnout rate is given for a specific district (region) and propose a procedure to predict the vote rate by reflecting the turnout. In addition, case studies were conducted using data gathered through telephone interviews for the 20th National Assembly elections in 2016.

Why Does the American National Election Study Overestimate Voter Turnout?

Surveys are a key tool for understanding political behavior, but they are subject to biases that render their estimates about the frequency of socially desirable behaviors inaccurate. For decades the American National Election Study (ANES) has overestimated voter turnout, though the causes of this persistent bias are poorly understood. The face-to-face component of the 2012 ANES produced a turnout estimate at least 13 points higher than the benchmark voting-eligible population turnout rate. We consider three explanations for this overestimate in the survey: nonresponse bias, over-reporting and the possibility that the ANES constitutes an inadvertent mobilization treatment. Analysis of turnout data supplied by voter file vendors allows the three phenomena to be measured for the first time in a single survey. We find that over-reporting is the largest contributor, responsible for six percentage points of the turnout overestimate, while nonresponse bias and mobilization account for an additional 4 and 3 percentage points, respectively.

Key Determinants of Online Fiscal Transparency: A Technology-Organization-Environment Framework

Online fiscal transparency is a concept to describe a government’s practice to disseminate financial information on their websites. In this research, we apply the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework to examine the determinants of online fiscal transparency in U.S. states. Using a panel dataset of all 50 U.S. states from 2010 to 2016, we find that the overall development of digital government is positively related to online fiscal transparency. We also find that short-term financial resources, as measured by the annual budget surplus, enable state government to develop better online fiscal transparency programs, while the long-term financial conditions, as measured by the accumulative fund balance, are negatively related to online fiscal transparency. Citizen’s education level, voter turnout rate, Internet infrastructure, and state legislature’s requirement to disclose financial information via Internet are all positively related to the development of transparency websites.

Fostering turnout?: Assessing party leaders' capacity to mobilize voters

Although recent research on the personalization of politics has provided empirical evidence of leadership effects on voting behaviour, previous studies have dealt primarily with an impact on vote choice, neglecting the primary step of the voting decision process: turnout. Exploring the relationship between leader effects and turnout gains relevance considering the generalized decline in voter turnout rates across Western democracies as a symptom of the dealignment process, pointed as a key cause of the personalization of politics. Despite this theoretical linkage, it is yet unstudied whether voters' evaluations of leaders have an effect on turnout.This study attempts at assessing the impact of voters' evaluations of political leaders on turnout decisions using data from 25 countries, derived from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Results show a positive significant effect of voters' evaluations of candidates on turnout. Moreover, this effect was especially strong amongst dealigned voters.

Silencing the seventh trumpet: Analyzing the effect of private schooling on voting behavior

The United States has one of the lowest election turnout rates in the developed world. Consequently, social scientists are perpetually seeking to expand upon their knowledge of what factors are associated with voting, or the lack thereof. Commonly identified factors including age, income, race, and educational attainment have been studied extensively. However, while the quantity of education is deemed important, the type of education is overlooked. The limited literature that exists on the topic suggests that private schools have a positive effect on civic outcomes, including voter participation. In using a rich, nationally representative dataset—the Understanding America Study based out of the University of Southern California—this study reexamines whether attending a private school has an effect on whether Americans vote. It also sheds light on a heretofore-unanswered question: How does private schooling affect which candidate an individual supports? Overall, the data indicate that private schooling appears to have no impact on voter turnout, but that attending some private school appears to have a liberalizing effect.

The price of a vote: Diseconomy in proportional elections.

The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this investment is translated into votes is still unknown. By performing data analysis and modeling, we show that top candidates spend more money per vote than the less successful and poorer candidates, a relation that discloses a diseconomy of scale. We demonstrate that such electoral diseconomy arises from the competition between candidates due to inefficient campaign expenditure. Our approach succeeds in two important tests. First, it reveals that the statistical pattern in the vote distribution of candidates can be explained in terms of the independently conceived, but similarly skewed distribution of money campaign. Second, using a heuristic argument, we are able to explain the observed turnout percentage for a given election of approximately 63% in average. This result is in good agreement with the average turnout rate obtained from real data. Due to its generality, we expect that our approach can be applied to a wide range of problems concerning the adoption process in marketing campaigns.

Disagreement over ID Requirements and Minority Voter Turnout

I address the debate in this journal about the effects of strict voter ID laws on voter turnout rates of whites and minorities. Although some noteworthy disagreements remain, the exchange has nonetheless resulted in methodological advancements and agreement among the authors on some of the substantive findings. After focusing the discussion on key areas of remaining disagreement, I discuss several ongoing concerns. Specifically, the authors do not actually estimate key quantities of interest, the analyses uncritically combine different kinds of elections where ID laws are likely to have different effects, and no reasonable theory exists to explain why ID laws would increase overall voter turnout beyond the short term.

Voter turnout and opposition performance in competitive authoritarian elections

This study examines the relationship between voter turnout in competitive authoritarian elections and the performance of opposition parties. Because the individuals most likely to abstain from voting in such elections are opponents to the regime, increases in voter turnout rates should be positively correlated with increases in opposition vote shares. Evidence from 61 competitive authoritarian elections in the post-Cold War era supports this expectation: higher voter turnout is associated with more votes for the opposition. This relationship holds under a variety of circumstances, even when taking into account differences in electoral misconduct from one competitive authoritarian election to the next. Data from recent state-level elections in Malaysia reveal a similar pattern. By showing that opposition parties tend to fare better when voter turnout rates are higher, this study contributes to our understanding of voting dynamics and opposition performance in non-democratic contexts.

That’s Why the Lady Lost to the Trump: Demographics and the 2016 Presidential Election

I examine the relationship between demographics and vote choice using pre-election tracking polls, exit polls, and data on the American states. A number of important findings emerge: (1) there was a fair amount of preference stability in 2016; (2) Clinton underperformed Obama in 83% of demographic groups examined; (3) at the state level, the percent of whites with low levels of education and the size of the rural population had important effects on vote choice, and both of those variables were more strongly correlated with Democratic vote share in 2016 than in 2012; and (4) while state turnout rates were moderately correlated with Clinton’s vote share, changes in state turnout rates from 2012 to 2016 did not have a substantial impact on Clinton’s performance.

A Border Strategy Analysis of Ad Source and Message Tone in Senatorial Campaigns

Political advertising is controversial, as there is widespread concern about money from political action committees (PACs and super PACs) distorting the democratic process. Studying advertising effectiveness is, however, a challenging topic for several reasons, including the endogenous nature of fundraising and ad spending rates. However, the extensive use of targeting based on designated marketing areas (DMAs) creates a setting in which neighboring counties with comparable demographics receive different levels of advertising exposure. In this paper, we leverage these advertising discontinuities along DMA borders to study the relative effectiveness of political advertising on vote shares and turnout rates in 2010 and 2012 senatorial elections. We find that negative advertising sponsored by PACs is significantly less effective than that sponsored by candidates in affecting two-party vote shares and voter turnout. A 1% increase in negative advertising by the candidate produces a significant 0.015% lift in the candidate’s unconditional vote shares. By contrast, negative advertising from PACs is ineffective in increasing its supported candidate’s unconditional vote share. Further analysis reveals that the competitiveness of races moderates the effectiveness of political advertising, providing implications for those managing candidates’ campaigns, PACs, and super PACs. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1079 .

Reducing Turnout Misreporting in Online Surveys

Assessing individual-level theories of electoral participation requires survey-based measures of turnout. Yet, due to a combination of sampling problems and respondent misreporting, postelection surveys routinely overestimate turnout, often by large margins. Using an online survey experiment fielded after the 2015 British general election, we implement three alternative survey questions aimed at correcting for turnout misreporting and test them against a standard direct turnout question used in postelection studies. Comparing estimated to actual turnout rates, we find that while all question designs overestimate aggregate turnout, the item-count technique alleviates the misreporting problem substantially, whereas a direct turnout question with additional face-saving options and a crosswise model design help little or not at all. Also, regression models of turnout estimated using the item-count measure yield substantively similar inferences regarding the correlates of electoral participation to models estimated using “gold-standard” validated vote measures. These findings stand in contrast to those suggesting that item-count techniques do not help with misreporting in an online setting and are particularly relevant given the increasing use of online surveys in election studies.

The Political Consequences of Policing: Evidence from New York City

This paper explores the effect that municipal policing can exert on politics, and specifically investigates the effect that Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) policing has had on voter turnout and candidate choice in New York City. While extant studies of the American criminal justice system have found that mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement negatively impact political participation and engagement, few have explicitly explored policing’s relationship with politics and fewer still consider its mobilizing potential. Mobilizing data from over 2.7 million geo-coded police stops and data from a series of national and municipal elections this paper uncovers a pattern of voter demobilization, voter mobilization, and candidate choice that cannot be anticipated from extant studies in the literature. Specifically, it finds that while concentrated policing was associated with reductions in voter turnout in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections, it was associated with higher rates of turnout in the 2008 presidential election and 2013 Democratic primary and general mayor. Further analysis demonstrates that stopping intensity was strongly associated with candidate choice in the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary, such that higher rates of policing were positively associated with support for the candidate (John Liu) who advocated for eliminating SQF and less support for the candidate (William Thompson) who supported SQF. Together, these findings highlight the impact that policing can exert on political behavior, characterize the impact that harmful policing policies can play in instigating policing participation and engagement, and foreground the importance of considering local criminal justice policy and political action.

A Review on the Efficacy of Immediacy Factors towards Achieving Communication Satisfaction via Email among Academic Staff

Abstract The review paper intensively explored immediacy factors influencing communication satisfaction through asynchronous computer mediated communication mediums. Immediacy is one of the constructs of social presence theory deemed capable of compelling communication satisfaction on asynchronous computer mediated communications. It has been established in numerous related studies conducted on asynchronous virtual mediated channels. However, little or no consideration seemed to have been given to exploring these immediacy factors towards ascertaining communication satisfaction via email, as one of the asynchronous mediated communications. The need to study this via email is essential, especially towards making it more efficient since it still remained the third means of communication predominantly used for dispatching corporate issues. In this review, prompt feedback, approachability and similarity personality were the dimensions of immediacy explored in relations to the effectiveness towards attaining communication satisfaction on asynchronous virtual communications. The findings showed that these dimensions examined were capable of inspiring immediacy towards achieving communication on asynchronous computer mediated channels. Therefore, it is expected that these may equally motivate communication satisfaction via email as one of asynchronous virtual mediums. It also showed that most of the studies so far conducted were dominated by qualitative and mixed-method approaches. Few quantitative studies encountered in the review appeared lacking the capacity of generalizing the outcomes due to respondents’ poor turnout rate and inadequate sample sizes issues. Thus, empirical quantitative studies are still needed via email mode of interaction in order to resolve these issues and for revalidating the outcomes of the review.

Effects of municipal mergers on voter turnout

ABSTRACTWe study the effects of municipal mergers on voter turnout in a difference-in-differences framework, using data from a wave of municipal mergers in Finland in 2009. Analysing two pre-merger elections and three post-merger elections, spanning a total of 17 years, we find that municipal mergers decrease voter turnout by 4 percentage points in the long run in the relatively small municipalities compared to similar small municipalities that did not merge. As the average turnout rate prior to merging in this group was around 69%, this is a substantial effect. We also find that virtually nothing happens to turnout in the municipalities that were relatively large within their merger. Furthermore, mergers are associated with a decrease in voters’ political efficacy and turnout decreases more in those municipalities that experience larger decreases in efficacy.

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.

Turnout in Transitional Elections: Who votes in Iraq?

ABSTRACTElectoral turnout in Iraq is a puzzling phenomenon. Despite the country’s lack of a democratic past, undeveloped party system, volatile political alliances, inexperienced voters, ethnic politics, sectarian violence, and terrorism, Iraqis’ electoral engagement has reached impressive levels. Given the importance of political participation at the foundational stages of democracy, this article places the individual within a broad context to draw an image of the likely Iraqi voter using five nationally representative surveys covering the three Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2005, 2010, and 2014. The main findings indicate that the Iraqi voter is likely to be a middle-aged, educated male with interest in politics and trust in the political institutions. Surprisingly, the socioeconomic and ethnic identities of the voter are not related to that individual’s decision to participate. Provincial-level violence has a complex and unstable link to individual turnout, depending on its timing, scale, and frequency, but it does not hinder participation. These results challenge some of the common themes in the literature on Iraqi politics and democratization. With the alarming decline in the turnout rate of the 2018 elections, this study is a preliminary guide to understanding how to sustain citizens’ engagement in new democracies.

Turnout in Transitional Elections: Who Votes in Iraq?

Electoral turnout in Iraq is a puzzling phenomenon. Despite the country’s lack of a democratic past, undeveloped party system, volatile political alliances, inexperienced voters, ethnic politics, sectarian violence, and terrorism, Iraqis’ electoral engagement has reached impressive levels. Given the importance of political participation at the foundational stages of democracy, this article places the individual within a broad context to draw an image of the likely Iraqi voter using five nationally representative surveys covering the three Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2005, 2010, and 2014. The main findings indicate that the Iraqi voter is likely to be a middle-aged, educated male with interest in politics and trust in the political institutions. Surprisingly, the socioeconomic and ethnic identities of the voter are not related to that individual’s decision to participate. Provincial-level violence has a complex and unstable link to individual turnout, depending on its timing, scale, and frequency, but it does not hinder participation. These results challenge some of the common themes in the literature on Iraqi politics and democratization. With the alarming decline in the turnout rate of the 2018 elections, this study is a preliminary guide to understanding how to sustain citizens’ engagement in new democracies.

Place and participation in local elections

How does place matter for participation in local politics and elections? To date, social scientists have largely ignored this question, in part because their focus has not been on local politics and elections. We think this is unfortunate given that 99% of all governments in the U.S. are local governments. Given stark differences in rates of turnout and office seeking across local and state/federal elections, we believe more attention to the way in which ‘sense of place’ affects residents' political behavior is warranted. In this study we look explicitly at how the geographic, functional, and socio-demographic features of cities shape turnout and contestation in local elections. Analyzing mayoral elections in two U.S. states, we find evidence not only that contextual factors are associated with both turnout and contestation, but place itself matters, independently of the features of its inhabitants, for the health of local democracy.

Trickle-Up Political Socialization: The Causal Effect on Turnout of Parenting a Newly Enfranchised Voter

Scholars have argued that children affect their parents’ political behavior, including turnout, through so-called trickle-up socialization. However, there is only limited causal evidence for this claim. Using a regression discontinuity design on a rich dataset, with validated turnout from subsets of Danish municipalities in four elections, I causally identify the effect of parenting a recently enfranchised voter. I consistently find that parents are more likely to vote when their child enters the electorate. On average across all four elections, I estimate that parents become 2.8 percentage points more likely to vote. In a context where the average turnout rate for parents is around 75%, this is a considerable effect. The effect is driven by parents whose children still live with them while there is no discernible effect for parents whose child has left home. The results are robust to a range of alternative specifications and placebo tests.