The Electoral College System, Political Party Dominance, and Voter Turnout, With Evidence from the 2004 Presidential Election

Abstract

Voter turnout, Political party dominance, Electoral college, D72,

Female Labor Force Participation and Voter Turnout: Evidence from the American Presidential Elections

“…Moreover, robustness testing affirms the strength and consistency of these findings. Interestingly, the female labor force participation rate has been used as a control variable in three prior studies (Verba et al 1997;Cebula 2004;Cebula and Meads 2008). In the first of these studies (Verba et al 1997), which involved data for the 1992 election cycle, female labor force participation was not found to significantly raise aggregate voter turnout (or women's engagement in political activities).…”

“…In a time series study of the period 1960, Cebula (2004 found the first difference of the female labor force participation rate to elevate the percentage voter turnout. The third of these studies (Cebula and Meads 2008) uses the female labor force participation rate as a control variable in a cross-section investigation of the impact of the Electoral College and political party dominance on the 2004 general election, finding a positive and statistically impact thereof upon voter turnout. These three studies involved estimations of rudimentary models by Ordinary Least Squares.…”

“…Indeed, the efforts by Barreto et al (2004), Cebula (2004), andWhitby (2007) are consistent with the two ways in which Matsusaka and Palda (1999, p. 442) suggest that future research can better explain voter behavior, namely: (1) to continue to search for new explanatory variables and to move away from reliance on traditional demographics such as age and income; and (2) to move toward the study of aggregated voting behavior, where individual idiosyncrasies will cancel each other out and allow the estimation of models with greater explanatory power. Also consistent with these suggestions, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993), Cebula and Tullock (2006), Tullock (2006), and Cebula and Meads (2008) introduce an aggregative "voter cost-benefit model" of aggregate voter behavior and provide empirical analysis as well. In addition, it is noteworthy that Lacombe et al (2016) develop yet an alternative voter turnout perspective, namely, one focusing on the demand for votes.…”

When life happens: the impact of life events on turnout

“…However, recent scholarship has increasingly highlighted that economic adversity can also motivate action. County-level (Burden and Wichowsky, 2014) and State-level analyses (Cebula and Toma, 2006; Cebula and Meads, 2008) from the US have documented the positive impact of unemployment on turnout, strongly suggesting that economic hardship does not necessarily lead to depressed participation levels.…”