We present results from laboratory experimental elections in which candidates can choose to provide informative advertisements and voting is voluntary. We also compare advertisements that are costless to voters with those that reduce voter payo¤s. We …nd that informative advertisements increase voter participation as predicted. However, the e¤ect is much less than found in previous studies of t...

Objectives. Traditional theories of turnout are of limited applicability to college students: the concepts and measures associated with these theories were not designed with students in mind, and factors not considered by the traditional theories are relevant. We offer a new theoretical perspective for understanding college student turnout and test it using a new data set. Methods. We conducted...

We estimate habit formation in voting—the effect of past on current turnout—by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that rainfall on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates imply that a 1-point decrease in past turnout lowers current turnout by 0.6-1.0 points. Further analyses suggest...

In this document, we describe in greater detail how we arrived at the continuous-time model. We accomplish several tasks here. First we establish that the turnout functions exist, and we present the continuous-time turnout functions in the case that one party wins all the elections on some interval of time. Second, we derive the α(t) formalism we employed in Section 1.2; this is our most import...

This paper examines the effectiveness of racialized Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) messages at mobilizing black voters. Here we use a mail-based voter mobilization experiment containing 134,000 black registered voters conducted during 2008 North Carolina Democratic Presidential primary to test two different explanations for how racialized voter mobilization messages might increase black voter turnout ...

As with the other presidential elections from this decade, the 2008 election was followed by considerable speculation as to how new efforts to mobilize voters affected the eventual outcome. Although the conventional wisdom implies that “Democrats benefit from higher turnout,” previous research in political science demonstrates that such a conclusion applies to actual election results inconsiste...

One prediction of the calculus of voting is that electoral closeness positively affects turnout via a higher probability of one vote being decisive. I test this theory with data on all mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria between 1946 and 2009. Importantly, I use constitutionally prescribed two-round elections to measure electoral closeness and thereby improve on existing work that ...

Past research suggests that spouses influence one another to vote, but it relies almost exclusively on correlation in turnout. It is therefore difficult to establish whether spouses mobilize each other or tend to marry similar others. Here, we test the dependency hypothesis by examining voting behavior before and after the death of a spouse. We link nearly six million California voter records t...

For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local constituencies and 34 councils, we identify both ...

7 Abstract It is conventional to speak of voting as ‘‘habitual.’’ But what does this 8 mean? In psychology, habits are cognitive associations between repeated responses 9 and stable features of the performance context. Thus, ‘‘turnout habit’’ is best 10 measured by an index of repeated behavior and a consistent performance setting. 11 Once habit associations form, the response can be cued even ...