Why Do People Vote? A Psychological Analysis of the Causes of Voter Turnout

Abstract

A great deal of scholarship has explored why some democratic citizens vote while others do not. This article reviews that literature through a lens presuming that a person's likelihood of turning out on election day is a multiplicative function of his or her ability to vote, her or her motivation to vote, and the difficulty of obtaining the needed information and carrying out the behavior of voting. We conclude that (a) turnout is made more difficult and less likely by onerous registration procedures; (b) turnout is more likely among some demographic groups because of greater motivation or ability or less difficulty; (c) the social setting in which a person lives and the psychological dispositions he or she possesses can affect turnout by shaping motivation, ability, or difficulty; (d) characteristics of a specific electoral contest can inspire or discourage turnout; and (e) canvassing and interviewing people about an election can increase turnout, but preelection polls and election-day outcome projections do not. Consequently, an individual citizen's turnout behavior is a joint function of his or her social location, his or her psychological dispositions, the procedures involved in voting, and events that occur at the time of each election.One of the most fundamental questions challenging political psychologists is why citizens in a democratic country vote. Hundreds of articles, chapters, and books have been published on this issue during the last century. In this article, we offer a review of this literature to highlight many of the fascinating (and sometimes surprising) findings that have emerged from this work, and to propose hypotheses and puzzles to be addressed by researchers in the future.

Electoral Administration in Fledgling Democracies: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

“…Consistent with research on costs of voter registration in Western contexts (e.g., Dyck and Gimpel 2005;Stein and Vonnahme 2008;McNulty, Dowling, and Ariotti 2009;H. E. Brady and McNulty 2011;Bhatti 2012;Braconnier, Dormagen, and Pons 2017) and the Harder and Krosnick (2008) theoretical framework, improving the accessibility of voting registration opportunities increases voter registration by about 2% over status quo polling stations. In contrast, observational evidence in Isaksson (2014) suggests that individual resources do little to explain variation in voter turnout, a result that may be explained by misreporting or social desirability bias in survey data (Kolstad and Wiig 2016;Adida et al 2019).…”

“…By combining satellite data with the spatial locations of polling stations, we blocked units on three prognostic covariatespoverty, population density, and distance to the constituency election office -allowing us to efficiently estimate treatment effects across subgroups (Moore 2012). Similar to Nickerson (2015) and consistent with Harder and Krosnick (2008), we find strong differences by context, with higher-poverty units seeing the greatest increases in registration. Localization increases voter registration by approximately 4.4% in the poorest areas, relative to 0.7% in the richest areas.…”

“…Theoretically, election administration may shape citizen participation and electoral outcomes via three channels (Harder and Krosnick 2008): citizen ability (e.g., understanding eligibility requirements); motivation (e.g., social pressure or norms regarding participation); and difficulty (e.g., factors influencing the costs of participation). Election commissions may target these channels through decisions about where, how, and how often to register voters, as well as via their communication and education strategies.…”

“…Third, we examine how impersonal SMS reminders of registration opportunities shape voter registration. Unlike previous work, we test the multiplicative nature of Harder and Krosnick (2008) directly. We find that when combined with localization, SMS reminders increase voter registration by 2.4% relative to the status quo, 20% more than localization alone.…”

The ‘Realness’ Discourse of a Political Leader: A Komunikasi Berasa Perspective

“…A communication that is able to build hope and a good first impression also gives positive influence in shaping public attitudes toward the presidential candidates (Holbrook et al, 2001). In fact, with reliable communications, the public will be led in determining their choice on a candidate (Harder and Krosnick, 2008).…”