Surveys are a key tool for understanding political behavior, but they are subject to biases that render their estimates about the frequency of socially desirable behaviors inaccurate. For decades the American National Election Study (ANES) has overestimated voter turnout, though the causes of this persistent bias are poorly understood. The face-to-face component of the 2012 ANES produced a turnout estimate at least 13 points higher than the benchmark voting-eligible population turnout rate. We consider three explanations for this overestimate in the survey: nonresponse bias, over-reporting and the possibility that the ANES constitutes an inadvertent mobilization treatment. Analysis of turnout data supplied by voter file vendors allows the three phenomena to be measured for the first time in a single survey. We find that over-reporting is the largest contributor, responsible for six percentage points of the turnout overestimate, while nonresponse bias and mobilization account for an additional 4 and 3 percentage points, respectively.
Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible—that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.
agement of my advisor Elvin Lim. For taking on a student who was only halfprepeared at best and guiding me with a gentle hand, I owe you a debt of Gratitude. This thesis would also not have been possible without the freedom to explore and learn R offered to me by Andrew Drechsler at Strategic Telemetry. In that same vein, many thanks are also owed to Katharine Lauderdale for helping this new R user cope with countless trivial problems. But most importantly, this thesis would never have occurred without the twenty-two years of preparation by my parents Tom and Linda Spahn. Though my mother did not survive to see me write it, this thesis could never have been completed without her. It is dedicated to her memory.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.