Bringing the polls to the people: How electoral access encourages turnout but shapes political inequality

Abstract

Attempts to increase electoral access are generally seen as unambiguously desirable in new democracies. While these policies can increase the size of the electorate, they may also carry costs through changing electorate composition, by differentially enfranchising those who are highly sensitive to costs. Using new administrative data from South Africa and a difference-in-differences design, I show that a 15 year, large scale, expansion of access to voting stations increased national turnout by between 2.3 and 4.7 percentage points. In the context of a natural quasi-experiment, I then use 39,000 survey respondents geo-referenced to their nearest voting station to document that those of high socioeconomic status, and those who are older, are much more sensitive to electoral access than others. This may affect electorate composition in favor of those already economically or politically powerful, who also happen to be more opposed to redistributive public policies and have particular partisan preferences.

Electoral Arrangements and Turnout Variance at the Sub-National Level: Comparative Insights from Three Constituencies in Ghana

“…Another dimension to the cost of voting is the demands on the voting day, reflected in the time it takes to travel to the polling station as well as the waiting time to vote, as these being argued to influence the decision to turn out or not (Gimpel and Schuknecht 2003;Dyck and Gimpel 2005: 531-548;de Kadt 2019). Though nonlinear, the relation between distance to the polling station and turnout has been argued to be negative as the cost of travelling to the voting site could result in nonvoting (Dyck and Gimpel 2005: 531-548).…”