Voter Turnout and Preferences Aggregation∗

This paper studies how voter turnout affects the extent to which voter preferences are aggregated in elections. Given that voting is costly, election outcomes disproportionately aggregate the preferences of voters with low voting cost. We show that the correlation structure among preferences, costs, and perception of voting effi cacy can be identified, and explore how the correlation affects preference aggregation. Using 2004 U.S. presidential election data, we find that minority, young, low-income and less-educated voters are underrepresented. All of these groups tend to prefer the Democrats except for the less-educated. Democrats would have won 8 more states if everyone turned out. keyword: voter turnout, preference aggregation, election ∗We thank Heski Bar-Isaac, Karam Kang, Santiago Oliveros and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra for helpful comments. †Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley 530 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA, 94720-3880. Email: [email protected] ‡Department of Economics, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. Email: [email protected] §Department of Economics, HKUST Business School, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Email: [email protected]