This paper explores the causal influence of access to Western television programming on voting behavior. We exploit a natural experiment involving access to West German TV within the German Democratic Republic in which only geography and topography determined the allocation of individuals to treatment and control groups. Focusing on both the shares of extremist parties and voter turnout, we fin...

Why do people turn out to vote? By requiring coordination and by generating positive externalities on others while involving a private cost, turning out to vote resembles a public good contribution and is therefore subject to collective action problems. While this has been established theoretically, the empirical evidence is fraught with measurement and identification problems. We investigate w...

There has been much research in economics concerned with the factors affecting voter turnout. This research has so far ignored how the presence of children affects an individual’s propensity to vote. This paper shows that having young children decreases the likelihood of voting. Low income individuals are especially vulnerable to this increased cost of voting due to children, while higher incom...

This paper presents a novel technique for improved voting by adaptively varying the membership boundaries of a fuzzy voter to achieve realistic consensus among inputs of redundant modules of a fault tolerant system. We demonstrate that suggested dynamic membership partitioning minimizes the number of occurrences of incorrect outputs of a voter as compared to the fixed membership partitioning vo...

A considerable body of research focuses on why voter turnout changed — specifically, why it declined — in the 1960s and 1970s. Most models of the change focus on factors such as a decline in civic involvement or a shift in the age distribution toward younger citizens who vote less frequently. While these approaches have taught us much about voter turnout, they are puzzling in that none actually...

From measurements using stationary and rotating disc and ring-disc electrodes, it is concluded that the reduction reactions of the divalent methylviologen cation MV 2(to MV +" and MV °) proceed via the conduction band of both porous and crystalline silicon. The product of the second reduction step (MV °) forms a blocking layer on the electrode. The oxidation reactions of MV ° and MV ÷" take pla...

We develop a formal model in which the government provides public goods in different policy fields for its citizens. We start from the basic premise that two office-motivated candidates have differential capabilities in different policy fields, and compete by proposing how to allocate government resources to those fields. The model has a unique equilibrium that differs substantially from the st...

Only in recent years has the “likely voter” technology been extended to polls well in advance of an election. In the case of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, CNN/USA Today/Gallup tracking polls indicated considerable fluctuations in likely voter preferences, greater than among the larger pool of registered voters surveyed. This article explores how Gallup’s likely voter model exaggerates th...

Voter turnout is considered the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to assessing the health of civic participation in a democracy; low turnout in particular is indicative of broader problems. Although voter turnout is quite high in both Sweden and Finland, turnout is notably higher in Sweden despite a long list of similarities between the two countries. Why is there this puzzling discrepanc...