This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in ...national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.
Young adulthood is a critical period in civic development. However, measuring electoral participation among this group generally—and the many young people who go to college in particular—is fraught ...with potential pitfalls stemming from a reliance on survey-based measures of voting. In this note, we compare patterns of youth turnout in two large-scale, survey-based datasets commonly used to measure voting, the Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, to two voter-file based datasets: the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) and a comprehensive nationwide voterfile provided by the Data Trust. We find high levels of concordance between measures in the NSLVE, Data Trust, and the CPS. However, despite linking their sample to validated voter records, the CCES does not mirror these benchmarks. We conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities that shape the study of youth turnout.
Difference-in-differences (DID) is commonly used for causal inference in time-series cross-sectional data. It requires the assumption that the average outcomes of treated and control units would have ...followed parallel paths in the absence of treatment. In this paper, we propose a method that not only relaxes this often-violated assumption, but also unifies the synthetic control method (Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller 2010) with linear fixed effects models under a simple framework, of which DID is a special case. It imputes counterfactuals for each treated unit using control group information based on a linear interactive fixed effects model that incorporates unit-specific intercepts interacted with time-varying coefficients. This method has several advantages. First, it allows the treatment to be correlated with unobserved unit and time heterogeneities under reasonable modeling assumptions. Second, it generalizes the synthetic control method to the case of multiple treated units and variable treatment periods, and improves efficiency and interpretability. Third, with a built-in cross-validation procedure, it avoids specification searches and thus is easy to implement. An empirical example of Election Day Registration and voter turnout in the United States is provided.
Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of ...low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.
Many jurisdictions in the United States have recently adopted single-winner ranked choice voting (RCV) to replace first-past-the-post plurality elections. This study contributes to the literature ...examining the potential consequences of changing to RCV by modeling the relationship between electoral systems and voter turnout. We propose that RCV may increase turnout by incentivizing increased contacts with voters. Previous attempts at assessing the relationship between RCV and turnout in the US have been limited by a lack of individual-level turnout data measured across all cases where RCV is and is not used. The study utilizes large, unique data from administrative voter turnout records that overcomes this limitation. We find significant and substantially higher probabilities of turnout in places that use RCV, and find evidence that campaigns in RCV places have greater incidences of direct voter contacting than in similar places that do not use RCV.
•New insights into how ethnic divisions influence African democracies.•Higher ethnic inequality escalates conflict, reducing political participation.•Election conflict is a key mediator between ...ethnic inequality and voter turnout.•Ethnic inequality's impact on turnout more pronounced in higher populated areas.
To what extent is voter turnout influenced by ethnic inequality? We combine ethnolinguistic maps on sub-national locations of ethnic groups with night-time light satellite images to construct a dataset of ethnic inequality across sub-national locations in 24 African countries. Using election data from the constituency-level elections archive, we show that ethnic inequality is negatively associated with voter turnout. This relationship holds even after we control for endogeneity and geographic characteristics. We also construct a dataset of election conflict across the sub-national areas. We find that an increase in ethnic inequality is associated with an increase in conflict, which reduces voter turnout.
The study analyses the explanatory order of variables such as political identification, political efficacy and electoral participation in the political system from a multi-directional perspective. It ...also investigates how these variables are in turn influenced by segmentation variables,
including age, gender, income, educational level, social class and religiosity. The paper examines the structural relationships between socio-demographic profiles and voter turnout, considering the potential influence of political efficacy and party identity. Structural models were applied
using data from the CIS 3226 Survey. The findings indicate the significant role of political identification in explaining perceived political efficacy and electoral behaviour, the effect of political efficacy on voter turnout, and the changing influence of classical segmentation variables.
Internet and Politics GAVAZZA, ALESSANDRO; NARDOTTO, MATTIA; VALLETTI, TOMMASO
The Review of economic studies,
10/2019, Letnik:
86, Številka:
5 (310)
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the U.K. Our analysis shows that the internet has ...displaced other media with greater news content (i.e. radio and newspapers), thereby decreasing voter turnout, most notably among less-educated and younger individuals. In turn, we find suggestive evidence that local government expenditures and taxes are lower in areas with greater broadband diffusion, particularly expenditures targeted at less-educated voters. Our findings are consistent with the idea that voters’ information plays a key role in determining electoral participation, government policies, and government size.
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