IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/pscirm/v3y2015i2p205-219_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Regular Voters, Marginal Voters and the Electoral Effects of Turnout

Author

Listed:
  • Fowler, Anthony

Abstract

How do marginal voters differ from regular voters? This article develops a method for comparing the partisan preferences of regular voters to those marginal voters whose turnout decisions are influenced by exogenous factors and applies it to two sources of variation in turnout in the United States—weather and election timing. In both cases, marginal voters are over 20 percentage points more supportive of the Democratic Party than regular voters—a significant divide. The findings suggest that the expansion or contraction of the electorate can have important consequences. Moreover, the findings suggest that election results do not always reflect the preferences of the citizenry, because the marginal citizens who may stay home have systematically different preferences than those who participate. Finally, the methods developed in the article may enable future researchers to compare regular and marginal voters on many different dimensions and in many different electoral settings.

Suggested Citation

  • Fowler, Anthony, 2015. "Regular Voters, Marginal Voters and the Electoral Effects of Turnout," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 3(2), pages 205-219, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:3:y:2015:i:2:p:205-219_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2049847015000187/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Salomo Hirvonen & Jerome Schafer & Janne Tukiainen, 2022. "Policy Feedback and Civic Engagement: Evidence from the Finnish Basic Income Experiment," Discussion Papers 155, Aboa Centre for Economics.
    2. Marco Frank & David Stadelmann & Benno Torgler, 2023. "Higher turnout increases incumbency advantages: Evidence from mayoral elections," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 529-555, July.
    3. Cantoni, Enrico & Gazzè, Ludovica & Schafer, Jerome, 2021. "Turnout in concurrent elections: Evidence from two quasi-experiments in Italy," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    4. Marco Frank & David Stadelmann & Benno Torgler, 2020. "Electoral Turnout During States of Emergency and Effects on Incumbent Vote Share," CREMA Working Paper Series 2020-10, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    5. Reeves, Aaron & Mackenbach, Johan P., 2019. "Can inequalities in political participation explain health inequalities?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 234(C), pages 1-1.
    6. Louis Kaplow & Scott Duke Kominers, 2020. "On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout," NBER Working Papers 26913, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:3:y:2015:i:2:p:205-219_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. 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.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ram .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.