Contested Elections and Voter Turnout in a Local Community: A Problem in Spurious Correlation

This paper presents an attempt, in a case study, to infer causal relationships between contests for local elective office and voter turnout—an attempt which required, in turn, the use of a recently developed mathematical technique for identifying and eliminating spurious correlations. The method no doubt has wider applications.The case study involves a small New England town and its annual February town elections over the period 1947–1963. The town was chosen as one of the six affected by the newly established Cape Cod National Seashore. The time period was chosen to cover the interval during which the town was faced with the rapid increase in tourism which transformed it from a declining agricultural town to a service-based town. The policies and methods by which the town dealt with this basic change in its economic structure were of immediate interest, especially in the latter years when the National Park Service became involved in the problems the Cape has faced in this postwar period.