Communication is fundamental to elections. This paper extends canonical voter turnout models to include any form of communication, and characterizes the resulting set of correlated equilibria. In contrast to previous research, high-turnout equilibria exist in large electorates and uncertain environments. This difference arises because communication can be used to coordinate behavior in such a w...

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite—that many do vote—would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that messages emphasizing low expected turnout are less effective at motivating voters than messages emphasizing high e...

To assess the impact of electoral systems on voting turnout, cross-national studies can be usefully complemented by studies of turnout in local elections in countries using more than one electoral system at that level. In this article, we look at data from a 1998 survey of Swiss municipalities to revisit the findings of our earlier study. This previous study, based on a 1988 survey, concluded, ...

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 precipitation on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates imply that a 1-point decrease in past turnout lowers current turnout by 0.7-0.9 points. Further analyses su...

We investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models. In a generalized costly voting model, we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large, then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient. Increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participat...

For voters with “social” preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections. Less important elections are predicted to have lower turnout, but a feedback mechanism keeps turnout at a reasonable level under a wide range of conditions. The main contributions of t...

Many papers have tested the prediction of the rational voter model that, ceteris paribus, turnout will be low when potential voters expect the winner's plurality to be large. The appropriate null hypothesis, however, is unclear. We show that statistical models of voting in which each voter's decision of whether to vote does not vary with the expected plurality can nonetheless generate data whic...

What effect does candidate race have on co-racial voter turnout? Recent studies suggest that the presence of a black candidate results in an increase in black turnout. We argue that much of these findings can be attributed to the different design choices of previous researchers, and absence of attention paid to strategic candidate behavior. In this study we examine mayoral elections in the stat...

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

This short note aims to update the model of Dubois and Ben Lakhdar (2007) which showed the significant impact of holidays on the turnout at French presidential elections. The main result of this update is that holidays are still relevant in the explanation of turnout after the sample was expanded in both spatial and temporal dimensions. More precisely, estimations from a sample composed of the ...