PURPOSE The goal of this project was to examine the factors related to the high level of voter turnout among older adults and how these factors have changed across the past 50 years. The study builds on previous research efforts by combining individual level analyses from three nationally representative surveys. DESIGN AND METHODS We examined voter turnout among older citizens using the Ameri...

Controversy persists over the link between turnout and the likelihood of success of Democratic candidates (e.g., DeNardo, 1980, 1986; Zimmer, 1985; Tucker and Vedlitz, 1986; Piven and Cloward, 1988; Texeira, 1992; Radcliff, 1994, 1995; Erikson, 1995a, b). We argue that the authors in this debate have largely been talking past one another because of a failure to distinguish three quite different...

Recent studies have argued that mobilization is not only an important determinant of individual participation, but that it can explain the mystery of declining voter turnout in the United States over the past 40 years. We identify and evaluate three possible ways in which mobilization might have affected levels of turnout over time: (a) aggregate rates of mobilization may have declined, (b) the...

The Impact of Incumbency on Turnout: Evidence from Italian Municipalities We analyze how having an incumbent among candidates affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set providing information on the electoral results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993-2011. Endogeneity issues are handled through an instrumental variable approach using the mayor term-limit as an instrument...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) render a valuable platform for tackling one of democracy’s central challenges: low voter turnout. Studies indicate that lack of information and cost-benefit considerations cause voters to abstain from voting. VAAs are online voting assistance tools which match own political preferences with those of candidates and parties in elections. By assisting voters in th...

Does the issue content of campaign appeals mobilize particular subsets of voters? We examine whether issue content interacts with the interests and agendas of ‘‘issue publics,’’ focusing on the relationship between campaign messages and the turnout of senior citizens, veterans, and parents. Our analysis matches Current Population Survey respondents to media markets and then to relevant campaign...

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 w...

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not – as is often suggested – imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the limit. We characterize limiting equilibrium turnout and show that it may actually be arbitrarily large. I...

We use variation produced by the Electoral College—the creation of battleground and non battleground states—to examine explanations for why people vote. We employ a longer time series (1980-2008) than previous research to gauge the effect of battleground status on state-level turnout. Our model includes (1) midterm elections, allowing us to directly compare the effect of battleground status wit...