A randomized, two‑year Finnish basic income experiment (2017–2019) assigned a substantial group of unemployed adults to receive an unconditional basic income (BI). The central question: can a social policy reduce the link between low income and low turnout by changing how recipients experience the welfare state?
This study asks whether strict voter identification (ID) laws affect voter turnout in the United States and whether effects differ by election type and by when states adopted these laws. Using state-level turnout from 1984–2020 and a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to address time-varying confounders and improve power, the paper compares aggregate and disaggregated effects across presidential versus midterm elections and between early- and late-adopting states. The central contribution is evidence that aggregate effects are close to zero but that heterogeneous, modest impacts appear in some contexts and may help reconcile mixed prior findings.
This paper asks whether expanding pension benefits increases political participation among retirees, testing policy feedback and habit-formation theories with a causal design. The authors leverage a large pension reform in Illinois that raised benefits and use a regression discontinuity approach on administrative records to estimate turnout effects among retired public employees across multiple elections.
This study investigates how the timing of local elections affects the electoral success of minority candidates and the overall descriptive composition of local officeholders.
This study asks whether populist campaign rhetoric matters for elections by increasing turnout rather than persuading vote choice. Using a large U.S. conjoint experiment that included an explicit abstention option, the authors separate mobilization effects of populist messaging from persuasion and from candidates’ policy positions. The paper's central contribution is testing whether populism changes who shows up to vote even when it does not change which candidate voters prefer.
The 1992 Los Angeles riot sparked debate on whether violent protests increase policy support. Using geocoded data and analyzing polling station records before and after the event near an election, this study finds a counterintuitive result: the riot led to a marked liberal shift in voter preferences.
Equal turnout supports equal representation, but mandatory voting may shift who shows up.
This study asks whether starting to cohabit with a partner changes individual voter turnout and uses a large administrative dataset to compare turnout before and after couples move in together. The authors' central contribution is an empirical comparison that leverages timing: households that begin cohabiting just before an election are compared to those that begin just after, allowing assessment of turnout changes associated with taking up shared residence.
This research asks whether working in the public rather than the private sector causally affects electoral participation. Existing cross-sectional survey work is unpersuasive because of data limits and the possibility that people sort into jobs based on preferences that also drive turnout.
This study asks whether high school civic education influences voter turnout in adulthood by merging detailed academic transcript information on social studies and civics coursework with a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative cohort of adolescents. The authors present a sequence of regression models: initial specifications show apparent associations between civics coursework and later turnout, but the associations shrink after adding individual and family controls and disappear in family fixed-effects models that compare siblings. The analysis concludes that any causal effect of high school civic instruction on adult voting is at best very small, and the study finds no evidence that courses emphasizing service learning, civic skills, or political issues increase turnout.
Scholars often assume informal workers in Latin America vote less and tilt rightward, but prior empirical results vary. This article synthesizes the quantitative evidence by conducting meta-analyses on the universe of previous studies that link labor informality to voting outcomes, estimating average effects for turnout and vote choice and exploring conditions that modify those effects.
This paper examines how parenting children who become new eligible voters influences parents' own voting behavior. The research uses a regression discontinuity design with validated turnout data from Danish municipalities across four elections, identifying causal effects.
This paper challenges the conventional view that democratic consolidation depresses voter turnout.
Vote brokers are crucial intermediaries for politicians seeking to mobilize voters through clientelist appeals, yet the effectiveness of different broker types remains unclear.
The use of vote centers has increased nationwide. This article examines their impact on voter turnout across different election cycles in Texas.
Urban renewal in Chicago between 2000 and 2004 displaced over 25,000 African Americans from public housing projects. This article examines the impact of this demographic change on white voters' political behavior.
Rainfall is widely used as an as-if random shock in political science and economics, but county-level rainfall assignment is highly correlated across space. Because this clustered assignment does not align with clear unit boundaries, conventional variance estimation for rainfall effects on political outcomes is challenging and may understate uncertainty.
Compulsory voting is typically thought to close the turnout gap between rich and poor. Using Brazil—the largest country that enforces compulsory voting—evidence shows the opposite: compulsory voting increases turnout inequality by education (a proxy for socioeconomic status).
Ecological inference—inferring turnout and vote choice for racial groups from aggregate election returns and neighborhood racial composition—can generate aggregation bias that distorts race-specific turnout and vote-share estimates. A different strategy is to predict individual-level ethnicity from voter registration records and then aggregate those predictions.