In this article I examine whether turnout in the 2000 presidential election was influenced by closeness and candidate expenditures. Evidence that closeness affects turnout supports the theory that voters assign more weight to their votes in close elections. Evidence that expenditures increase turnout provides support for the argument that greater mobilization efforts increase turnout in close e...

Turnout is an important determinant of which candidate wins an election. Since candidates know this, it follows that they will consider turnout when choosing their policy platforms. In this paper I formally examine the effect voter turnout has on candidates’ policy positions. In a related paper Ledyard (1984) finds that, with strictly concave citizen utility, both candidates choose the same pol...

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...

Voter turnout in game theoretic models of voting has typically been difficult to predict because of the problem of multiple Nash equilibria. Many of these equilibria require an extreme precision of beliefs among voters that is unlikely to be reached in real elections. At the same time, mechanisms like pre-election polls exist to shape the beliefs of voters about expected turnout. We combine the...

Word Count: 149 Article Word Count: 2175 Abstract Given the persistence of public doubts about the integrity of ballot secrecy, which depress turnout, two prior experiments have shown precise evidence that both official governmental and unofficial mobilization campaigns providing assurances about ballot secrecy increases turnout among recently registered nonvoters. To assess whether these findi...

This paper starts from four observations: (1) voter turnout is declining in established democracies; (2) low turnout means socio-economically unequal turnout; (3) compulsory voting is an effective means to increase turnout; (4) even low-turnout countries, however, have neither introduced nor even contemplated a legal obligation to vote. A closer look at the arguments against compulsory voting s...

In this paper I investigate the dynamic relationship between formal education and voter turnout over the past half century. I reframe Brody’s puzzle about why rising education levels did not produce higher voter turnout using The American Voter’s ‘‘funnel of causality’’ to allow for a dynamic relationship between education and turnout. Analyzing survey data from 1952 to 2004, I show that the ef...

The goal of this dissertation is to aid our understanding of how electoral institutions in the United States affect political participation and, in turn, shape policy outcomes. I investigate this relationship by analyzing the all-mail balloting method known as Vote By Mail. Using a data set of 3310 cases representing elections in 7 states, I show that the use of Vote By Mail produces an overall...

In many post-election surveys, the proportion of respondents who claim to have voted is greater than government-reported turnout rates. These differences have often been attributed to respondent lying (e.g., Burden 2000). In a search for greater accuracy, scholars have replaced respondent self-reports of turnout with government records of their turnout (a.k.a. turnout validation). Some scholars...

Given the persistence of public doubts about the integrity of ballot secrecy, which depress turnout, two prior experiments have shown precise evidence that both official governmental and unofficial mobilization campaigns providing assurances about ballot secrecy increase turnout among recently registered nonvoters. To assess whether these findings replicate in other political settings, we descr...