Yet manufacturing jobs make up a fraction of the US job market while service jobs (of all types) continue to grow. On the other hand, a compelling, systematic study by Cantoni and Pons (2021) finds that voter ID laws have no statistically significant impact on voter turnout. (1986). Southwell, P. L. (1988). Further, GAO (2014) examines voter turnout between the 2008 and 2012 general elections in Kansas and Tennessee, which adopted voter ID laws, and concludes that the measures decreased turnout by 1.9 to 3.2 percentage points. Crucially, this study compares covered and noncovered counties that share a border, and it provides substantial economic and voter-characteristic data indicating that these neighboring counties were alike. In my presentation, however, I focused on three aspects that effect voter turnout and elections. Economic judgments, party choice, and voter abstention in cross-national perspective. In particular, because I focus on relative economy using the media-coverage-based spatial reference points, explained below, the time dimension of the dataset is heavily restricted to data availability in Lexis-Nexis database. Do political parties and candidates make of an effort to take advantage of the way the media benchmarks? Voter turnout tends to be lowest among youth, those who are less educated, and those in lower income brackets. A negative economy signals to the public that the government is not capable of addressing such problems, which leads to a loss of confidence in representative institutions (Van Erkel & Van der Meer, 2016) and a loss of enthusiasm in political participation (Taylor, 2000). [1] Relatedly, voter registrationa prerequisite for votingamong Black Americans in the South increased markedly after the Voting Rights Acts passage. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation. Comparative Political Studies, 38(4), 417442. This is due in part to the powerful effect of education, one of the strongest predictors of voting turnout. . In short, older voters tend to vote more than younger voters. 8.5 5) Promote civility during campaigns. B. Model 1 is based on the conventional strategy including domestic economic variables measured by temporal comparisons (retrospective). There has been sufficient empirical research reporting that income inequality affects negatively voter turnout. Overall, the mechanism presented in this study suggests a significant connection between relative macroeconomic conditions and voter motivation to turn out, but it is important to note that testing the above-stated hypotheses were performed at the aggregate level. Estimating the electoral effects of voter turnout. While the analysis by Ang (2019) ends with the 2016 election, it provisionally supports the hypothesis that the Shelby decision decreased voter turnout. Social Psychology Quarterly, 4154. The author hypothesizes that the share of the Republican vote increased due to political backlash among racially conservative whites.. Albeit compelling, the resource and competence based theories of economic impact on voter turnout are not supported by evidence from most cross-national studies, which find no effects of economic fluctuations on voter turnout across regional samples including the US (Arcelus & Meltzer, 1975), Latin America (Fornos etal., 2004), post-Communist countries (Fauvelle-Aymar & Stegmaier, 2008), and global samples in Blais and Dobrzynska (1998) and Blais (2000). This competence-based analysis results in two opposing implications. The root of the gap appears to be in the fact that high earners turn out much more often than working-class people, from whose ranks the unemployed disproportionately come. A good relative economy will increase the level of turnout. ", Mejia, Daniel & Posada, Carlos-Esteban, 2007. In fact, each percentage point increase in those with a college or postgraduate degree reduces the turnout rate by 0.12 points. Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through for only $16.05 $11/page. Jurisdictions covered by Section 5 saw increased private sector antidiscrimination legal action relative to comparable noncovered jurisdictions. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. Macroeconomic performance, political trust and the Great Recession: A multilevel analysis of the effects of within-country fluctuations in macroeconomic performance on political trust in 15 EU countries, 19992011. (2017). London: London School of Economics. Free press. Second, this direct increase in demand and pay boosted competition for Black workers within the private sector. The White House Similarly, an economy which out-performs relative to others is expected to either increase voter turnout because of the strong confidence in politics that it brings, or otherwise decrease turnout because the electoral stakes are lowered. - Voter turnout rates, 1789-2020 Presidential elections Since January 2021, 18 states have enacted 30 separate laws that many analysts believe will make it more difficult to vote. Polit Behav (2021). 8 Steps to Reduce Negative Campaigning in Politics. Everything from family status to beliefs about abortion can determine how a person will vote. Participation tends to be lower during midterm congressional elections with only about 40 percent of eligible voters participating though the 2018 midterm electionsbroke from this trend, with almost 50 percent of eligible voters participating (see herefor information on voter turnout by election year). Any requirements that cost voters more time or make processes more complicated will have a negative effect on voter turnout. Kern, A., Marien, S., & Hooghe, M. (2015). When the domestic growth is held constant, the benchmark growth increases when we move from left to right in sub-figure (a). Sci., 9, 111125. A., & Banducci, S. A. Effect of domestic and benchmark(s) economy on turnout (CI 95%). The solid line represents the confidence intervals of the coefficients from PCSE estimations, and the dashed line represents the confidence intervals of the coefficients from Fixed Effect estimations in Table2. Scandinavian Political Studies, 17(1), 130. The Fixed Effects specification does not include variables that do not (or rarely) vary overtime within a country such as Compulsory Voting. American Political Science Review, 89(3), 634647. A Theory of the Calculus of Voting. Fornos, C. A., Power, T. J., & Garand, J. C. (2004). Explaining voter turnout: A review of aggregate-level research. West European Politics, 33(3), 586607. For a review on turnout measurement, see Online Appendix A in Geys (2006). Given the close link between distance to a polling place and ones ability to vote, Shelbys adverse impact on voter turnout may have been at least partially due to these closures. More specifically, very low-income voters face more obstacles to voting, such as time away from work and adequate transportation, than those with higher incomes. These hypotheses predict variations in aggregate turnout levels based on relatively poor and relatively good economic conditions. This research attempts to expand the boundary of applications by looking at how voters react to relative economic performance when they make a decision to turn out. For instance, one interesting question is how a relative economy affects political trust, democratic satisfaction, and political efficacy. The alternative framework suggests that voters ought to participate in elections more often when they perceive the economy to be poor (Schlozman & Verba, 1979; Southwell, 1988). Economic and political effects on European Parliamentary electoral turnout in post-communist Europe. The effects of low voter turnout are being studied by many political scientists and campaign psychologists, who try to leave no stone unturned to bring voters to the . Harvard University Press. One reason for this ambiguity might be rooted in a limited understanding of how voters form attitudes about economic performance. The sign of \(\beta _{1}\) (a good relative economy) should be positive when voters find strong competence signal in their incumbent (H1b), whereas it should be negative if the stakes of an election are lower with high probability of incumbents victory (H2b). ", Nadia Fiorino & Nicola Pontarollo & Roberto Ricciuti, 2017. In contrast, a good relative economy instills a sense of trust and confidence in government, and satisfaction with the politics to the citizens, and consequently increases the portion of voters who are likely to turn out (H1b). An education group, and then a catch-all other.. Kaplan and Yuan (2020) use cross-county increases and decreases in the number of days of early voting in Ohio to estimate that each additional day of early voting increases turnout by 0.22 percentage point. Still, within each of these groups, gender gaps persist. Moreover, the increase of 4 to 8 percentage points was driven entirely by higher nonwhite turnout; coverage had no observable impact on white turnout, but nonwhite turnout grew by 7.5 to 20 percentage points from 1984 to 2016. Being exposed to this one-sided media, citizens appear to react asymmetrically to the economy itself. In fact, both conflicting and null findings lead Blais (2006), in his comprehensive survey of the turnout literature, to conclude that there is no clear relationship between the economic conjuncture and turnout. (117). (Istanbul Arel University, Istanbul, Turkey). PCSE estimations are in Model 2 and 4, and Fixed Effects estimations are in Model 3 and 5.Footnote 20. Grnlund, K., & Setl, M. (2007). To account for rival explanations, I include various political and socioeconomic variables based on previous studies.Footnote 12 I include Compulsory Voting variable.Footnote 13 In decades of scholarship, a positive correlation between turnout and mandatory voting has been found (Powell, 1986; Gray & Caul, 2000; Fornos etal., 2004). At macro-level tests, the relative economy variable has been understood as a contextual factor, which is a distant cause to explain the levels of turnout. There are endless studies citing the effects of voter demographics on turnout. Next CEA Post: The Cost of Living in America: Helping Families Move Ahead, The Cost of Living in America: Helping Families Move, https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/08/16/the-importance-of-protecting-voting-rights-for-voter-turnout-and-economic-well-being/?utm_source=link, Office of the United States Trade Representative, nine states, 53 counties across five states, and two townships, research suggests a few potential pathways. To the best of the authors knowledge, no studies have incorporated the idea of relative economy in their voter turnout models, even when operating under competence-based (rather than resource-based) theoretical mechanisms. Benton (2005,p. 430) suggests a similar estimate of a 1.7 percent shift in incumbent vote share. ", Mayshar, Joram & Moav, Omer & Neeman, Zvika, 2011. In particular, given the frozenness of party systems (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967), the impact of party mobilization in determining election outcomes is eroding (Van der Brug, 2010), especially for countries that do not experience significant party system changes between elections. In sum, voters who clearly feel relatively deprived by the poor relative economy will want to use elections to signal their grievance. The other four models incorporate international benchmark(s) economy. Weve already started to accept that the working class is not the same as the white working class. When trust matters: Explaining differences in voter turnout. Dynamic models for dynamic theories: The ins and outs of lagged dependent variables. The waning impact of party mobilization means that elections are often determined by differential turnout, and the electoral effects of turnout have therefore increased (Hansford & Gomes, 2010). Determinants of voter turnout have been extensively researched for years. Before defining our classes we can look at how income and education is stratified across the different industries. Historically, voter turnout has varied significantly by race and ethnicity, with White and Black voters more likely to report they voted than Hispanic and Asian American voters. They are a critical component of the GOPs future. There are a few industries where a majority of participants are making more than $100,000: legal, management and engineering. A brief information about the Benchmark is available in the Information about Benchmark(s) section in Online Appendix, and the full information is available in the Supplementary Document of Park (2019) at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102085. Higher socioeconomic status more likely to vote, older citizens more likely to vote. Over a billion dollars will be spent during this election cycle. Voter turnout is a mix of two factors: Internal (motivation, eagerness, knowledge) and External (eligibility, mobilization, voter suppression). Factors that affect voter turnout are age, race, and gender. Turnout did not decrease among white voters from 2012 to 2016 in previously covered counties relative to noncovered counties, but turnout among nonwhite voters decreased by 2.1 percentage points in covered relative to noncovered counties over the same period. 2008) caused by the relative decline in the rate of economic progress (Gurr, 1970). The predicted value of turnout is above 75% at the lowest value of GDP growth rate of Benchmark(s), however the predicted value of turnout reaches around 67% with Benchmark 1 and 64% with Benchmark 2 where the GDP growth rate of Benchmark(s) arrives at their maximum value. Two categories capture the more traditional working class: traditional blue collar and service blue collar. Both of these groups include those without a college degree but the industries differ for them. I then created a large office category that are likely to be those working in an office environment but at something closer to entry level. That was because Section 5 required proof that the closure would not have a racially discriminatory effect. ", Imrohoroglu, Ayse & Merlo, Antonio & Rupert, Peter, 1996. Therefore, on average, the estimated Ordinary Least Square (OLS) effect will be always closer to zero than it is supposed to be (Wooldridge, 2015). The vast majority of academic research supports the notion that the Voting Rights Act increased voter turnout. In 2014, for example, the voting rate for non-Hispanic white adults was 45.8 percent while the rate was 39.7 percent for black adults and 27 percent for Hispanics, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows. In particular, the research discussed here assesses the impact of Section 5 on electoral turnout and wages by comparing these outcomes before and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in covered versus noncovered counties. Introductory econometrics: A modern approach. Partisan identification tends to be a somewhat better correlate for this than education is. According to Geys ( 2006) and Blais ( 2006 ), turnout is higher under permissive institutions (e.g. Existing studies offer conflicting analyses of the effect of the economy on voter turnout; some studies suggest that a poor economy leads to lower turnout while other studies find the. This is also true for those in food preparation and personal care (part of the new working class service industry). Moreover, localities needed to notify voters of polling place closures ahead of time. Oxford University Press chapter, 25, 599616. (2008). The VP-Fuction: A Review. Percentage of voting age population as compared to the percentage of registered voters, by selected country. Based on the ANES cumulative dataset (1948-2016), the correlation between ed. Voter turnout is still being stifled in states like Ohio and Texas by the reduction of voting locations that cause long lines. Every winning angle will be exhausted, and the best minds in the business will make every effort to understand voters and invent the mechanisms that will sway their votes in November. The mobilization hypothesis and voter turnout in Congressional elections, 19741982. Industry is not perfect as every industry has a managerial class, but it does provide significantly more information than just income and education. Retrieved March 2, 2016, from http://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101. Pacek, A. C., Pop-Eleches, G., & Tucker, J. Journal of Business and Management, 15(1), 95. Forty-seven percent of whites working in professional jobs support Democrats, along with 50 percent of educators. Although the weight of evidence points toward a negative relationship between a poor relative economy and turnout at the aggregate level, future research will be needed to pursue the issue that has been raised here. Voters may perceive that the national economy is performing worse this year compared to the average growth from past years. Comparative European Politics, 5(4), 400422. Weschle (2014) suggests two ways in which poor economic management increases indifference among voters. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Reading, 291 Edith Morley, Reading, RG6 6EL, UK, You can also search for this author in 2. Learn More. For a review, see Stegmaier etal. Radcliff (1992) points out that In part, the confusion may result from measurement and methodological shortcomings. (444) Palmer and Whitten (1999) provide a first insight on the measurement of the economy when observing that voters primarily concerned with unexpected growth and inflation since unexpected economic changes have real income effects and serve as more reliable indicators of government competence. (Palmer & Whitten, 1999),p. 625) Building on this line of research, and in response to Radcliffs observation, this paper raises the question of whether economy variables are being properly introduced in the turnout models. In par-ticular, in the United States, levels of turnout hover around 60 percent in presidential elections, 40 percent in midterm elections, and much lower still in local elections, putting the U.S. in the bottom third of worldwide voter turnout. More specifically, to examine the distribution of domestic media message on foreign economic performance, Park (2019) collected the volume of news reports on foreign economies from a year prior to an election using Lexis-Nexis, which gives an idea to answer the question of compared to what for cross-sectional time-series analyses.Footnote 9, Using Parks (2019) media-identified reference points, I constructed two sets of benchmark. The economic vote: How political and economic institutions condition election results. Constructing relative economy based on media-guided spatial benchmark(s) seems not only the appropriate approach, but crucial to ensure empirical accuracy. Those who employ the term working class rarely attempt to define it. Stud., 41, 757. Comparative Political Studies, 33(9), 10911122. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election. Specifically, these researchers demonstrate that for the average county in a State that previously had literacy tests, the Acts increase in Black voter turnout is associated with a 16.4 percent increase in State transfers to local governments. The Journal of Politics, 68(2), 372385. For instance, scholars cite rising political distrust and falling levels of political efficacy and democratic satisfaction as evidence of the impact of macroeconomic conditions on voter turnout. The impact of political trust on electoral behaviour in the Belgian regional elections of June 2009. Age. Hence, education has an influence on different types of skills and knowledge, which reduce the costs of political actions, enable citizens to participate in an effective way, and therefore, facilitate political behavior. K. and M. Lewis-Beck. Negativity in political perception. If our assumptions about the white working class all come from an image of the mythologized blue collar worker of the the 1950s then we are missing how work has changed and how the people who work in this new blue collar service industry are politically different. As already noted, increasing distance to the polls has sizable and statistically significant adverse impacts on voter turnout. Dring, H. & Manow, P. (2012). On a bad year, that number can be less than 50%. Simply put, in the absence of a mobilization effect, the withdrawal effect might have even larger consequences on voter turnout. The literature on race and voter turnout has really been in search ofthe political science literaturekind of a silver bullet: the one thingthe one weird trickthat will lead to a reduction of disparities in voter turnout. Retrieved March 2, 2016, from http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/10/bad-weather-has-track-record-of-swinging-some-elections/, Voter Turnout. The figure is based on the PCSE estimations (Model 2 and Model 4) in Table2. I obtained the data on seat shares of parties from Armingeon etal. Turnout studies are ever expanding. This allows to link your profile to this item. When they do, the definitions they come up with are often frustratingly limited, such as those without college degrees. At the same time, the concept of working class quickly slips into the frame of blue-collar manufacturing work. Poor weather is also shown to benefit the Republican partys vote share. It has been argued that weather cost both Richard Nixon and Al Gore an election. 34. However, voters may not be able to extract the competence signal from the observed economy (Duch & Stevenson, 2008). How Does a Relative Economy Affect Voter Turnout?. A. Terms in this set (8) Education. Kriesi, H. (2012). Local elections and local government performance. This line of reasoning leads to the opposite expectation in H2a: A poor relative economy will increase the level of turnout. American Political Science Review, 104(2), 268288. Black professional, management, and office employees are all all in the same area around 81 percent to 82 percent. Annu. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09736-4, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09736-4. Ayta, S. E. (2018). Data shows that there's been a 54% decrease in voter turnout between 1959 when Hawaii became a state and 2018. Similar to the Vote-Popularity function, which considers incumbent support to be influenced by the state of the economy, 1 the underlying mechanism of the link between the economy and turnout, either through mobilization or withdrawal, is based on voter assessments of the incumbent's competence in handling the economy. Cox, G. W. (1988). The results imply that for a previously covered county with a 15 percent pre-Shelby Black population share that borders a noncovered county, removing coverage decreased private sector wages for Black workers by 7.3 to 8.9 percentage points, relative to wages for white workers. British Journal of Political Science, 51, 437449. (1). Polit. Arcelus, F., & Meltzer, A. H. (1975). Media-guided reference points and relative economic voting. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW ", Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. This approach, albeit convenient, is problematic because it assumes that voters across all elections and countries tend to be equally affected by the universal reference points. This invites a change in relative domestic economic performance from out-performance (i.e., the solid line is above the dashed line) to under-performance (the solid line is below the dashed line), denoted as \(\beta _{2}\) in Eq. Bomboy, S. (2012, October 29). Predictive Margins of Benchmark(s) Economy on Turnout (CI 95%). Quaranta, M., & Martini, S. (2016). Closeness and turnout: A methodological note. Applying the logic of both withdrawal and mobilization theories, plausible arguments can be made for two opposing directions, increasing and decreasing turnout levels. Lipset, S. M. (1960). When politics is not just a mans game: Womens representation and political engagement. Turnout in the United States Voter turnout in the United States is much lower than in other countries, hovering around 60% in presidential elections and 40% in midterm election years. Conversely, an abundance of resources leads to higher levels of turnout (Smets & Van Ham, 2003; Lipset, 1960). In the wealthy state, however, income has very little effect on voting: both the rich and the poor vote Democrat and Republican. The only positive is that the punditocracy might have finally broken from saying working class when they mean white working class. In this regard, at least in testing for competence-based accounts, the relative economy variables would perform better in the turnout model with greater validity by measuring what they are purported to measure. Put another way, voters are far less likely to take part in an election if they feel their vote is wasted. Moreover, adding interaction term with GDP growth rate reveals that if economic growth is positive and significant, the growing inequality tends to reduce voter turnout, which complies with the Schattschneider hypothesis, which is highly referred to in Electoral Politics. In particular, economic voting literature suggests that a good economy rewards the incumbent with increasing vote share. (2021) suggest. (2015) have coined the phrase collective relative deprivation for deprivation that occurs at an aggregate level, and they suggest that the collective assessment of economic adversity can increase levels of political participation (Kern etal., 2015; Kriesi, 2012). In 2020, turnout for high-income individuals was only 1.4 percentage points higher in states that automatically mailed ballots or applications to voters, compared to those that only moderately expanded accessibility, and just 3.6 percentage points higher than states that did not change their policies at all. A decade previously, voting rates for those groups were 48.8 percent, 42 percent and 30.8 percent, respectively. In particular, Lau (1982) notes that there is a tendency for negative information to have more weight than equally extreme or equally likely positive information. (353) Much scholarship has empirically shown that there is a clear negativity bias in media as it gives much more coverage to negative economic news than positive (Soroka, 2006; Hetherington, 1996).
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