In their landmark study of a field experiment, Gerber and Green (2000) found that get-out-the-vote calls reduce turnout by five percentage points. In this article, I introduce statistical methods that can uncover discrepancies between experimental design and actual implementation. The application of this methodology shows that Gerber and Green’s negative finding is caused by inadvertent deviati...

In the 1998 general election, Minnesota had a voter turnout of 60 percent in a nonpresidential year. While this was also the highest turnout in the nation, a significant number of Minnesotans still did not exercise their right to vote. In fact, 1.4 million eligible voters of the state did not vote and 119 million people did not vote nationwide, a 36 percent participation rate. It is not surpris...

We present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close, and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate. These findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences (e.g., through pre-election polls or expert forecasts) may unde...

We conduct a model validation analysis of several behavioral models of voter turnout, using laboratory data. We call our method of model validation concealed parameter recovery, where estimation of a model is done under a veil of ignorance about some of the experimentally controlled parameters — in this case voting costs. We use quantal response equilibrium as the underlying, common structure f...

We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular that the spatial correlation of turnout rates decay logarithmically with distance in all cases. This result is quantitatively reproduced by a decision model th...

This essay corrects the results reported in Gerber and Green 2000 and replies to Imai (2005). When data-processing errors are repaired, the original substantive findings from the New Haven experiment remain unchanged. As previously reported, brief phone calls do not increase voter turnout. The “correction” that Imai (2005) offers, which purports to show that these phone calls produce large, sig...

This research creates a theoretical framework for understanding the effect of Internet voting on the electorate. Based on standard Downsian rational choice voting theory, we claim that Internet voting lowers the cost of voting for certain voting demographics based upon race, age, and income. We further contend that this electoral advantage may crystallize the growing turnout disparity between d...

Time to Vote? Despite the centrality of voting costs to the paradox of voting, little effort has been made to accurately measure these costs outside of a few spatially limited case studies. In this paper, we apply Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to validated national election survey data from New Zealand. We calculate distance and travel time by road from the place of residence to th...

This article focuses on how the ability to speak and read English affects Latino citizens’ participation in U.S. elections, and evaluates the extent to which this language barrier might be overcome by living in a community with a relatively large Latino population and having access to registration materials and ballots in Spanish. Using data primarily from the Pew Hispanic Center, we find that ...

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the ...