Voter turnout statistics in elections across the United States reveal that political participation is too low. The United States Constitution was designed in a way to give the American people effective, elected representation at multiple levels. This can only be fulfilled if people actually turn out to vote. This study seeks to explain political participation at the city level. In city level po...

E arly or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method...

Countries differ quite substantially in mean turnout levels, and it is equally well known that there may be substantial within-country variation as well, for example, between high income and low-income groupings or between high political knowledge and low political knowledge groupings. It has been hypothesized that the size of such betweengroup gaps will fall as turnout rises, and conversely (F...

King’s EI estimator has become a widely used procedure for tackling so-called ecological inference problems. The canonical ecological inference problem involves inferring the rate of voter turnout among two racial groups in a set of electoral precincts from observations on the racial composition and total voter turnout in each precinct. As a Bayesian hierarchical model, EI links information abo...

This paper investigates between-voter interactions in a social network model of turnout. It shows that if 1) there is a small probability that voters imitate the behavior of one of their acquaintances, and 2) individuals are closely connected to others in a population (the “smallworld” effect), then a single voting decision may affect dozens of other voters in a “turnout cascade.” If people ten...

This paper examines a few of the numerous factors that may have led to increased youth turnout in the 2008 Election. First, theories of voter behavior and turnout are related to courting the youth vote. Several variables that are perceived to affect youth turnout such as party polarization, perceived candidate difference, voter registration, effective campaigning and mobilization, and use of th...

It is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout. We report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice Palfrey-Rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information. We find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data: the size ...

The paper looks at the link between inequality and voter turnout, and derives three hypothesis from previous literature. It is shown that inequality associates negatively with turnout at the national elections (hypothesis 1). Although this is not a very strong effect, but it is net of several factors affecting voter turnout that are empirically well proven – such as individual characteristics o...

Comparative literature suggests that campaigning efforts impact positively, both in terms of mobilization and turnout. Effects are not uniform. They may be affected by the electoral system, the electoral circumstances and the effectiveness of party management. Studies of district level (constituency) campaigning in Britain have identified two important trends. First, that effective targeting is...

Double slip turnout is common in heavy haul railway and due to its complex structure, its maintenance is difficult as well as important. Focusing on No.12 double slip turnout (75 kg/m rail), this study analyzed the intensity of the different slotted rubber pad under iron plate and track stiffness of turnout zone based on the finite element method with a purpose of improving the performance of t...