IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v107y2001i1-2p21-34.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pre-election Polling and the Rational Voter: Evidence from State Panel Data (1986-1998)

Author

Listed:
  • Kunce, Mitch

Abstract

This study examines the role of pre-election perceptions of race closeness, by way of newspaper polls, in motivating citizens to vote on a specific contest while in the voting booth. Results from an error components model (random effects), employing state panel data of concurrent gubernatorial and Senate elections for the period 1986 to 1998, fail to bolster the rational voter hypothesis that perceived closeness matters. The extent to which pre-election perception matters is shown to depend directly on how one measures the likelihood of a close contest. In contrast, few long-standing variables, inherent to the voting literature, have any impact on "within-booth" voting behavior. The majority of within-booth abstention is left unexplained; furthering the notion of Matsusaka and Palda (1999) that the act of voting, indeed, may be random. Copyright 2001 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Suggested Citation

  • Kunce, Mitch, 2001. "Pre-election Polling and the Rational Voter: Evidence from State Panel Data (1986-1998)," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 107(1-2), pages 21-34, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:107:y:2001:i:1-2:p:21-34
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Mei-yin Lin & Yi-ting Tseng & Jue-shyan Wang, 2011. "Closeness and Turnout: Evidence from Election of Taiwan," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 31(2), pages 1922-1928.

    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:kap:pubcho:v:107:y:2001:i:1-2:p:21-34. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.