Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The res...

Although low voter turnout in national elections has garnered considerable attention and concern, much lower turnout in municipal elections has often been largely ignored. Using a survey of cities in California, this article examines a series of institutional remedies to low turnout in mayoral and city council elections. Moving local elections to coincide with the dates of national elections wo...

Numerous papers by Public Choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by Downs (1957) that, ceteris paribus, turnout should be higher when elections are close. Most look in cross-sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type. By and large the results have been disappointing (see, e.g., Foster, 1984). We are s...

A considerable body of research focuses on why voter turnout changed — specifically, why it declined — in the 1960s and 1970s. Most models of the change focus on factors such as a decline in civic involvement or a shift in the age distribution toward younger citizens who vote less frequently. While these approaches have taught us much about voter turnout, they are puzzling in that none actually...

In recent years, the decline in election turnout seems to have abated in the United States, (McDonald and Popkin, APSR 2001) but it has been exacerbated in other advanced industrial democracies. For example, voter participation in Britain dropped from 75.3% in 1987 to 59.4% in 2001. While election officials, academics, and pundits in Britain and elsewhere agonize over the causes of the turnout ...

We present a stochastic model of coordination in turnout games with boundedly rational voters. In each period a randomly selected voter receives information about current play through noisy polls and then, based on this information, forms expectations about the current configuration of play and chooses a best response. We prove the existence of a unique limiting distribution for the process and...

Demonstration turnout is a crucial political resource for social movements. In this article, we investigate how mass media cover demonstration size. We develop a typology of turnout coverage and scrutinize the factors that drive turnout coverage. In addition, we test whether media coverage underestimates, reflects, or exaggerates "guesstimates" by organizers and police forces. Together, these a...

Competitive elections are frequently decided by which side can generate larger turnout on polling day. When decided on whether to turnout voters are assumed to balance the cost of going to the polls with the prospect of making a difference in the election outcome. We present a stochastic model of turnout where voters receive information about current turnout propensities of the voting populus t...

While conventional wisdom assumes that inclement weather on election day reduces voter turnout, there is remarkably little evidence available to support truth to such belief. This paper examines the effects of temperature, sunshine duration and rainfall on voter turnout in 13 Dutch national parliament elections held from 1971 to 2010. It merges the election results from over 400 municipalities ...

This paper challenges the dominant paradigm of turnout studies by proposing that turnout variations occur because elections differ, not because countries differ; and certainly not because people differ. Indeed, we take the radical position that what matters if we want to understand overtime and cross-national turnout variations is differences in the ways in which citizens are affected by the el...