Get Out the Vote: How Encouraging Voting Changes Political Outcomes

Some US states have introduced measures to increase voter participation. I develop a formal model of elections to study how these measures affect political outcomes. I find that at high enough levels, measures to increase turnout lead to candidates converging at the median voter’s ideal point, as candidates switch from choosing policies that motivate their partisan base to competing over centrist voters. At intermediate levels, however, different measure can result in drastically different political outcomes. Also, counter-intuitively, voter turnout is non-monotonic in measures to increase turnout: since these measures decrease the difference between the candidates’ political positions, they decreases benefit of voting. Empirically, I find that congressional representatives from states that have introduced measures to increase turnout have become less polarized.