Does attentiveness matter in survey responses? Do more attentive survey participants give higher quality responses? Using data from a recent online survey that identified inattentive respondents using instructed-response items, we demonstrate that ignoring attentiveness provides a biased portrait of the distribution of critical political attitudes and behavior. We show that this bias occurs in the context of both typical closed-ended questions and in list experiments. Inattentive respondents are common and are more prevalent among the young and less educated. Those who do not pass the trap questions interact with the survey instrument in distinctive ways: they take less time to respond; are more likely to report nonattitudes; and display lower consistency in their reported choices. Inattentiveness does not occur completely at random and failing to properly account for it may lead to inaccurate estimates of the prevalence of key political attitudes and behaviors, of both sensitive and more prosaic nature.

In this paper we use latent class analysis to identify the four faces of political participation. Previous research has generally focused on conventional forms of political participation (for example, voting), with some research looking as well at unconventional forms of political participation, like protesting. Moreover, most research studies these forms of participation separately. However, citizens actually engage in both conventional and unconventional participation simultaneously, and here we present a methodology that can identify citizens who engage in both, neither, or only one form of participation. Using our approach, we examine a series of hypotheses about how social, political, and economic grievances lead citizens to engage in each face of political participation. We apply this methodology to recent survey data from Argentina, which we argue is an excellent case for studying both forms of participation simultaneously. This application demonstrates the utility of the latent class approach for studying the four faces of political participation.

We study public opinions about convenience voting reforms, using a unique state-by-state survey conducted in the 2008 presidential election. Our analysis of the American voting public's support for potential convenience voting reforms provides a variety of important insights into the potential direction of innovations in the electoral process in the near future. First, we find that the most prominent convenience voting reforms have mixed support. These include attitudes toward automatic voter registration, Election Day voter registration, and moving Election Day to a weekend. These reforms do not have majority support among all voters in the United States but there are some states where these reforms do have majority support and could be implemented. Second, we find that Internet voting and voting-by-mail do not receive a great deal of support from American voters. There was no state where Internet voting was supported by a majority of voters and there were no states that do not already have expanded vote by mail (Washington and Oregon) where expanded vote by mail had majority support. Finally, we find that a majority of Americans support requiring showing photo identification (overwhelming support) and making Election Day a holiday (bare majority support).

Invalid voting and absenteeism are alternative sources of abstention under compulsory voting. Previous research failed to systematically study the mechanisms behind each form of non-voting and the relationships between them. We develop an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to jointly examine invalid voting and absenteeism in Brazil, the world’s largest democracy with mandatory voting. Using Bayesian inferential methods and analyzing both individual and district-level data, we show that less educated and politically knowledgeable citizens are less likely to vote and, when they do, they are typically unable to successfully complete their ballot. Unlike absenteeism, invalid voting also has a political dimension reflecting voters’ disenchantment with elections and democratic performance. Both sources of abstention coexist and, together, undermine electoral participation.