The Joke Isn’t on the Democrats? The Partisan Effects of Voter Turnout

This paper uses county-level electoral returns from the 1988-2000 presidential elections to measure the partisan effects of voter turnout. We first develop a simple theoretical model of voting to guide our analysis. We then argue that turnout is an endogenous variable to elections, so in order to obtain unbiased estimates we must use the instrumental variables estimator. In particular, we use weather as an instrument to show that voter turnout has a large and significant effect on partisan results, increasing the performance of Democrats. We then check if the effect is dependent on how partisan a county is, and find that it is not. Finally, we show that the effect does not have a meaningful trend over time. We finish by considering some implications of our findings. Alexander Kendall, May 14, 2004, Page iv