Changes in Congressional Turnout, 1972–2006

Abstract

This article investigates the causal relationship between campaign activity during U.S. House elections and district-wide turnout rates from 1972 to 2006. Utilizing panel data and a first differences modeling approach, turnout is conceptualized dynamically as change in turnout. Changes in campaign expenditures, competition, and other political campaigns are used to account for this conceptualization of turnout. This design permits inferences to be made about the causal relationship between changes in campaign activity and expected changes in turnout. The results indicate that House spending, competition, and Senate elections are important to turnout, especially during Midterm elections. Finally, a comparison between cross-sectional and first differences models provides evidence that problems can arise when attempting to make causal inferences using crosssectional data.

Campaigns, Mobilization, and Turnout in Mayoral Elections

“…We expect that contests with small spending gaps will generate more interest among voters and will also signal greater potential importance to turn out to vote, as the outcome is likely to be closer than in contests where there is a substantial gap in spending. Clouse’s (2011) study of Congressional turnout used a similar measure of spending competition and found results similar to those we anticipate. To our knowledge, other than Clouse’s work, this type of preelection measure of competition has not been used in studies of turnout.…”

Objective conditions, political knowledge, and perceptions of electoral competition in U.S. mayoral elections

“…Our measure of competitiveness is based on the spending margin between the top two mayoral candidates. 4 While many studies of competition have utilized the margin of victory (or some related measure) to measure competitiveness, the measure of the spending competition during the campaign used here has been used in studies of voter turnout (Clouse 2011;Heideman 2019;Holbrook and Weinschenk 2014a) and is a more direct measure of the level of competition voters are exposed to during the campaign. 5 Note that the assumption is not that voters have any real sense of the level of spending parity during the campaign but that contests in which neither candidate has a distinct spending advantage are likely to be relatively closely and hotly contested.…”

“I Would Prefer Not To”: Establishing the Missing Link between Invalid Voting and Public Protest in Latin America

“…This paper addresses these issues through a dynamic model: the dependent variable is the change in the percentage of invalid ballots between consecutive legislative elections and the independent variables are also in the differences. This choice enables the researcher to test the factors altering voters' decision to invalidate their ballot, and previous electoral studies have adopted a dynamic approach for congressional turnout in the United States (Clouse 2011) and for invalid voting in Latin America (Cohen 2018a). Using variables in differences presents the following advantages over a static specification:…”

“…This paper addresses these issues through a dynamic model: the dependent variable is the change in the percentage of invalid ballots between consecutive legislative elections and the independent variables are also in the differences. This choice enables the researcher to test the factors altering voters’ decision to invalidate their ballot, and previous electoral studies have adopted a dynamic approach for congressional turnout in the United States (Clouse 2011) and for invalid voting in Latin America (Cohen 2018a). Using variables in differences presents the following advantages over a static specification: It sets aside each country’s baseline level of invalid voting, avoiding reliance on institutional variables or fixed effects specifications. It makes different countries’ political contexts more comparable, as it looks at changes in citizens’ behavior that depend on a changing national environment. One can hardly argue that changes in invalid ballots are involuntary or simple errors.…”