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Article Excerpt
Raymond Wolfinger's seminal research has established with elegance and precision the demographic and institutional bases of voter turnout in the United States. With these results in hand, Wolfinger turned to the significant "so what?" question, probing the implications of higher levels of participation for electoral outcomes and subsequent policy making. Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980) and Highton and Wolfinger (2001) provocatively conclude that outcomes in recent American presidential elections would not have changed if everyone had voted and that, as a whole, the preferences of nonvoters are well represented by the opinions of voters (Highton and Wolfinger 2001, 179, 192).
This conclusion challenges much conventional wisdom. Because the poor and ethnic minorities are less likely to vote and because the Democrats have been the favored party among these groups, there is a pervasive belief that higher levels of turnout would favor the Democrats. Democratic politicians, prodded by their newly mobilized constituents, would then adopt bold policies that would reduce economic inequality (Lijphart 1997). For leftist dreamers, compulsory voting would mean a permanent Democratic majority that ultimately could bring social and economic democracy to America. But leaving aside such a utopian scenario, at a minimum there is evidence that the preferences of representatives better correspond to those of voters than nonvoters (Griffin and Newman 2005) and that states with greater lower-class turnout have more generous welfare policies (Hill, Leighley, and Hinton-Anderson 1995), suggesting that less than full turnout does have consequences for the quality of representation and the content of public policy in the United States.
Studying the implications of higher turnout entails a "what if" analysis that necessarily involves assumptions about how nonvoters would behave. Wolfinger and Rosenstone's skeptical take on the implications of higher turnout rests on survey research regarding the gap between the opinions of nonvoters and voters. Highton and Wolfinger replicate the analysis and extend it to respond to the argument that with universal turnout, the content of electoral campaigns would change to engage the hitherto neglected priorities of nonvoters. They show that despite the class differences between voters and nonvoters, the "grievances and aspirations" of the two groups are very similar and that the poorer, more heavily minority nonvoting group is, if anything, less class conscious (Highton and Wolfinger 2001, 187-88). (1) This raises doubts about whether low-income nonvoters would always be motivated by economic concerns and therefore consistently cast a pocketbook vote for the Democrats.
Relying on aggregate data rather than public opinion polling, DeNardo (1980) echoes these arguments. He confirms that the electoral advantage of higher turnout for Democrats in congressional races is neither large nor universal. This advantage depends not just on the strength of the party-class linkage but also on the election-specific factors that cause peripheral voters to defect. On the assumption that nonvoters are less likely to be strong partisans, higher turnout would hurt Democratic candidates whenever short-run forces favor the Republicans because defection rates would be higher among their newly mobilized partisans (DeNardo 1980; Martinez and Gill 2005).
The main conclusion of research on the relationship between turnout and electoral outcomes in congressional (DeNardo 1980; Wattenberg and Brians 2002; Wuffle and Collet 1997), Senate (Citrin, Schickler, and Sides 2003; Nagel and McNulty 1996), and presidential elections (Brunell and DiNardo 2004; DeNardo 1980; Highton and Wolfinger 2001; Martinez and Gill 2005; Nagel and McNulty 2000) is that the impact of higher turnout is both variable and usually small. In most cases, Democrats gain from higher turnout, and even a small shift in the partisan distribution of the vote can change the result in close elections. Nevertheless, in most of the American national elections analyzed in the studies cited here, even universal turnout evidently would not have produced a different winner. (2)
The purpose of this paper is to extend this research agenda by considering the implications of compulsory voting in the last four presidential elections. Because the 1992, 2000, and 2004 elections were so close, the tabloid version of our research question is, "If everyone had voted, would Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have gone to the White House?" On a loftier analytical plane, our primary concerns are to estimate, state by state, the partisan differential between voters and nonvoters and to explain variation in this differential. With the estimated party differential value in hand, we can calculate the effect of higher turnout on the actual Electoral College results. The inclusion of four elections permits comparisons across states and within states over time.
We find that, on average, nonvoters were slightly more Democratic than voters in each of the four elections examined. Some states--such as Texas and Colorado--have consistently large partisan differentials. Others, such as Pennsylvania and New York, have only very modest differences between voters and nonvoters. Our state-by-state estimates suggest that Bill Clinton likely would have won a handful of additional Southern states in 1992 and 1996 if there had been universal turnout, increasing his Electoral College margin. Our estimates suggest that there is a reasonably high probability that A1 Gore and John Kerry would have won under universal turnout, but both elections still would have been extremely close. This suggests that although universal turnout might well tip very close elections in the Democrats' favor, the electoral landscape would not be transformed. And, of course, the impact of higher but less than universal turnout would depend on which voters were mobilized in a particular contest.
Methods and Data
Our approach (see Citrin, Schickler, and Sides 2003) first requires a large enough sample of eligible voters within each state to make reasonable inferences. The best available data come from the November Voter Supplement that the U.S. Census Bureau conducts every election year as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS). This survey asks respondents whether they voted in the most recent election and contains large samples in every state. (3) This enables us to consider each state separately rather than assuming that the effects of increased turnout would be constant across states. (4)
Second, we need an estimate of how nonvoters would have voted. Because the CPS does not include questions about vote choice or partisanship, we rely on the Voter News Services (VNS) exit polls conducted in individual states on election day to generate models of electoral choice. The exit polls have large enough state samples to generate reasonable estimates of vote choice based on the demographic variables included in the CPS. And because exit polls, by definition, sample only voters, these estimates are not contaminated by inflated self-reports of turnout. (5) We link the VNS data with the CPS data in the following fashion:
1. Estimate a vote choice equation for the presidential race in each state using the relevant exit poll.
2. Take the coefficients from each equation and use them to construct a predicted vote for CPS respondents on a state-by-state basis. We include only respondents that are citizens age 18 and over. We assume that the parameters of voter choice would have been the same among nonvoters if they had voted. Cirrin, Schickler, and Sides (2003) provide reasons why this assumption is plausible. (Others who simulate the consequences of increased turnout--notably Martinez and Gill [2005]--make this same assumption.)
3. Compare the predicted aggregate vote choice of voters and nonvoters in the CPS to determine whether the outcome of the race in that state would have changed had all the nonvoters actually gone to the polls.
The first step in the simulation is to model presidential vote choice in each race. Drawing on the appropriate VNS exit poll, we estimate an equation in which the dependent variable, coded 1 for a Democratic vote choice and for a Republican vote choice, is a function...
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