Asking for your vote
Political Liberty: Who Needs It?
Jason Brennan
Social Philosophy and Policy, January 2012, Pages 1-27
Abstract:
This paper concerns the question of whether the political liberties tend to be valuable to the people who hold them. (In contrast, we might ask whether the liberties are valuable in the aggregate or are owed to people as a matter of justice, regardless of their value.) Philosophers have argued that the political liberties are needed or at least useful to lead a full, human life, to have one's social status and the social bases of self-respect secured, to make the government responsive to one's interests and generate preferred political outcomes, to participate in the process of social construction so that one can feel at home in the social world, to live autonomously as a member of society, to achieve education and enlightenment and take a broad view of the world and of others' interests, and to express oneself and one's attitudes about the political process and current states of affairs. I argue that for most people, the political liberties are not valuable for these reasons.
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Richard Hasen
Election Law Journal, December 2011, Pages 325-333
Abstract:
This article describes the drop in Supreme Court election law cases in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and offers at least a partial explanation as to the reasons for the drop. Although the general amount of election law litigation has risen dramatically since 2000, the number of cases in which parties sought Supreme Court review declined by more than 36 percent from the 1991-2000 decade compared to the 2001-2010 decade. Factoring that decline into account, the data show that the Court issued written opinions in nearly the same percentage of election law cases each decade in which parties sought Supreme Court review - 11.9% of cases in the 1991-2000 decade, and 10.5% of cases in 2001-2010. While I cannot exclude the possibility that the Court shied away from hearing some election law cases out of Bush v. Gore fatigue or as the result of random noise, the drop in the number of election law cases in which litigants sought Supreme Court review cases seems to explain a great deal of the decline. This article concludes by considering why the number of cases in which litigants sought Supreme Court review dropped so precipitously in 2001-2010 even as the total number of election law cases in the lower courts increased dramatically. One reason is that liberal litigants who had sought review especially in voting rights cases in the 1990-2000 period were less willing to do so in the 2001-2010 period, likely because they expected unfavorable results before the more conservative Roberts Court. The 2005-2010 period is especially important; the number of election law petitions in the Supreme Court dropped precipitously after Justice Alito joined the Court.
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Do Perceptions of Ballot Secrecy Influence Turnout? Results from a Field Experiment
Alan Gerber et al.
NBER Working Paper, December 2011
Abstract:
Although the secret ballot has long been secured as a legal matter in the United States, formal secrecy protections are not equivalent to convincing citizens that they may vote privately and without fear of reprisal. We present survey evidence that those who have not previously voted are particularly likely to voice doubts about the secrecy of the voting process. We then report results from a field experiment where we provided registered voters with information about ballot secrecy protections prior to the 2010 general election. We find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens without records of previous turnout, but did not appear to influence the behavior of citizens who had previously voted. These results suggest that although the secret ballot is a long-standing institution in the United States, providing basic information about ballot secrecy can affect the decision to participate to an important degree.
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Dariusz Dolinski & Marek Drogosz
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, November 2011, Pages 2673-2688
Abstract:
The problem of many democracies is low voter turnout. One reason is the voting procedure, which only allows voting for a party or candidate. Introduction of voting against could bring more voters to the polls. The concept of regulatory focus (Higgins, 1998) suggests that people who focus on prevention would vote more eagerly if they are given the opportunity to blackball disliked candidates. This article describes 2 studies that verify this hypothesis. In the first study, over two thirds of participants declared that they would vote more willingly if they had a "for or against" choice at the election. The second study shows that the "pro or anti" formula is especially attractive to participants with a prevention regulatory focus.
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Close Elections and Cognitive Engagement
Cindy Kam & Stephen Utych
Journal of Politics, October 2011, Pages 1251-1266
Abstract:
Existing research has focused primarily on the extent to which close elections affect turnout. While turnout is important, campaigns can also serve a social function by cultivating cognitive engagement. This article thus focuses on the extent to which close elections stimulate cognitive engagement among citizens. Observational data analysis suggests that close elections have a positive effect on cognitive engagement in senate campaigns. Experimental data analysis suggests that when close-election reminders appear in campaign discourse, citizens respond with greater cognitive engagement, as measured by a cognitive-response task and an information-seeking task. When reminded that a race is close, subjects think more about the candidates. They also seek more issue-based information, less group-based information, and read more about the election. Altogether, the results demonstrate that close elections increase citizen engagement.
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Moving to Opportunity: The Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment
Claudine Gay
Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In 1994, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program (MTO), a lottery that offered poor families vouchers to move out of public housing into private apartments. Drawing on recently collected vote history data, this study reveals that MTO has had the unintended consequence of reducing voter turnout among participating adults. The low turnout may be due to the loss of social ties that accompanied mobility. The findings suggest that residential mobility, a popular tool in the fight against poverty, may strain poor Americans' weak ties to the political system.
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Labor union membership and voting across nations
Patrick Flavin & Benjamin Radcliff
Electoral Studies, December 2011, Pages 633-641
Abstract:
Despite a large literature on voter turnout around the world, our understanding of the role of labor union membership remains muddled. In this paper, we examine the relationship between union membership and voting. Using individual level International Social Science Program (ISSP) data from thirty-two countries, we find that union members are more likely to vote and that the substantive effect rivals that of other common predictors of voting. This relationship is also largely invariant across an array of demographic factors, indicating that unions tend to be "equal opportunity mobilizers." We also find that unions have "spillover" effects: controlling for a variety of other factors, even non-union members are more likely to turn out to vote in countries with higher union densities. In sum, we find that labor unions have a consistent political influence across a wide set of countries.
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Pre-election polling and sequential elections
Patrick Hummel
Journal of Theoretical Politics, October 2011, Pages 463-479
Abstract:
I consider a model in which the winner of a primary election faces a third candidate in a general election immediately thereafter. Prior to the primary election, there is a pre-election poll on how voters would vote in a hypothetical general election between one of the candidates in the primary election and the third candidate. I illustrate that voters have an incentive to misrepresent their voting intentions in the pre-election poll in order to influence voter beliefs about candidate electability in the general election and possibly cause voters to vote differently in the primary election.
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Election Timing and Public Policy
Christopher Berry & Jacob Gersen
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, September 2011, Pages 103-135
Abstract:
There are nearly half a million elected officials in American local governments, and the timing of local elections varies enormously even within the same state. Some local elections are held simultaneously with major federal and state races, while others are held at times when no higher level elections coincide. We analyze the effect of election timing by exploiting a 1980s change in the California Election Code, which allowed school districts to change their elections from off-cycle to on-cycle. Because we are able to observe very large within-district changes in voter turnout resulting from changes in election timing, we are able to isolate the effect of turnout on policy outcomes, including teacher salaries and student achievement tests. Our analysis demonstrates that while election timing produces dramatic changes in voter turnout, resulting changes in public policy are modest in size and not robust statistically.
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Political Norms and the Private Act of Voting
Christopher Karpowitz et al.
Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 2011, Pages 659-685
Abstract:
Research spurred by the widespread adoption of new voting technology has largely neglected the issue of privacy. Using data from a field experiment, we find that a treatment intended to increase a sense of privacy is able to alter poll-worker and voter behavior, but has little direct effect on voter attitudes. More importantly, we find that concern about privacy is concentrated among an identifiable group: those who go against their community's descriptive political norm or majority. This "political minority" is more sensitive to issues of privacy and harder to reassure that voting conditions will safeguard the confidentiality of their choices. Data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study confirm that privacy is a concern for voters nationwide who feel out of step with their locality's political majority.
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The Democratic Turnout 'Problem'
Ben Saunders
Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
A number of authors, including Lijphart, Hill and Engelen, have recently advocated compulsory voting. While numerous justifications can be given for such measures, it is often said that they are necessary to realise democracy fully, for instance ensuring that everyone casts one vote (no more and no less). This argument rests on the commonly held assumption that low turnout is a problem for democracies - a claim that the present article resists. I argue that democracy as it should be understood requires only that citizens have the opportunity to exercise power. I show that the right to vote can be valuable, even if it is not actually exercised. Leaving people to decide for themselves whether or not to vote is not only more liberal but democratic in so far as it respects their choices and makes it more likely that decisions are made by the relevant constituency. Although voluntary voting makes it likely that different groups will be unequally represented, this is not necessarily a problem; where some are more affected by a given decision there may be good democratic reasons to allow them more influence. Disproportionality can be bad where it exacerbates existing social disadvantage, but here the problem is the social disadvantage, rather than that people do not vote. Moreover, while universal turnout ensures proportionality, the problem of disproportionality is conceptually distinct from low turnout. There may be other reasons to favour higher turnout, including a concern to promote social justice, but it is not necessarily better on democratic grounds.
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Unhappy, Uninformed, or Uninterested? Understanding "None of the Above"
Voting
David Damore, Mallory Waters & Shaun Bowler
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elections send ambiguous signals to the political system, particularly when interpreting the meaning of various "nonvotes" (e.g., abstention, ballot spoiling, and roll-off). While a "none of the above" (NOTA) option may allow voters to better signal discontent, how NOTA voting is used is not well understood. The authors' analysis of all races in Nevada, which has allowed for NOTA voting since 1976, suggests that NOTA voting is consistent with protest voting and limited information. Thus, while NOTA voting can be a less ambiguous signal of discontent than other nonvotes, the practice of NOTA voting is less clear.
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The Intersection of Redistricting, Race, and Participation
Danny Hayes & Seth McKee
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The drawing of congressional district lines can significantly reduce political participation in U.S. House elections, according to recent work. But such studies have failed to explain which citizens' voting rates are most susceptible to the dislocating effects of redistricting and whether the findings are generalizable to a variety of political contexts. Building on this nascent literature and work on black political participation, we show that redistricting's negative effects on participation - measured by voter roll-off in U.S. House elections - are generally strongest among African Americans, but that black voters can be mobilized when they are redrawn into a black representative's congressional district. Our findings, based on data from 11 postredistricting elections in five states from 1992 through 2006, both expand the empirical scope of previous work and suggest that redistricting plays a previously hidden role in affecting black participation in congressional contests.
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Letting the Counties Decide: Voter Turnout and the All-Mail Option in the State of Washington
Priscilla Southwell
Politics & Policy, December 2011, Pages 979-996
Abstract:
This research examines county-level voter turnout in the state of Washington - a state where a majority of its counties have chosen to adopt an all-mail electoral format over the past decade. Using the nearest neighbor match method to control for demographic and partisan variation among counties, this analysis of turnout in eight general and primary elections from 2004 to 2008 suggests that vote-by-mail has resulted in a modest boost in voter turnout during presidential election years and for special elections, but has little or no effect in congressional off-year elections.
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The Cost of Convenience: An Experiment Showing E-Mail Outreach Decreases Voter Registration
Elizabeth Bennion & David Nickerson
Political Research Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 858-869
Abstract:
Lower transaction costs have shifted voter registration activities online and away from traditional modes of outreach. Downloading forms may impose higher transaction costs than traditional outreach for some people and thereby decrease electoral participation. A randomized, controlled experiment tested this hypothesis by encouraging treatment participants via e-mail to use online voter registration tools. The treatment group was 0.3 percentage points less likely to be registered to vote after the election. A follow-up experiment sent reminders via text message to randomly selected people who had downloaded registration forms. The treatment increased rates of registration by 4 percentage points, suggesting that reminders can ameliorate many of the negative effects of directing people to downloadable online registration forms.
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Non-partisan 'get-out-the-vote' efforts and policy outcomes
Dan Kovenock & Brian Roberson
European Journal of Political Economy, December 2011, Pages 728-739
Abstract:
This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan 'get-out-the-vote' efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in the electoral process, we find that they have a meaningful impact on policy outcomes and are an important political influence activity for nonprofit advocacy organizations. In equilibrium, nonpartisan gotv efforts are more likely to arise in those segments of the electorate that are sufficiently small and disenfranchised (as measured by the ex ante voter abstention rate). Among those segments in which such efforts arise, the resulting gains are increasing in the level of disenfranchisement of the voters in the segment and decreasing in the segment's size.