This project examines the individual and structural factors that underlie a person's decision to vote. Prior research has made it clear that demographics affect how likely a person is to vote, and that increasing the costs associated with voting makes a person less likely to vote. The project constructs a new theory of voter turnout that merges these two findings, arguing that demographics determine political resources (including political knowledge and civic skills), which in turn determine whether a person is able to overcome the voting costs placed on him or her.
The project's intellectual merit is associated with its advances in theory and empirical research on voting. The project develops statistical models that test the interaction between demographics and voting costs to observe how voting costs differentially affect people based on their demographic characteristics. These models will account for demographics, the voting costs voters face, community characteristics, and the campaign environment. The project will provide insight into the costs that voters face and identify which types of voters are overburdened with voting costs and how turnout among these groups can be made more representative. The research examines voting costs that have received little attention in prior research, and incorporates several voting costs in the same model to discover precisely which costs are posing the greatest threat to turnout.
Studying voter turnout is of great importance because the people who vote tend to have more influence in matters of policy and government than those who do not vote. Voters have been shown to have different policy concerns than non-voters. If certain people routinely abstain from voting because the costs are too high, they may not be adequately represented in local, state, and federal government. This could leave segments of the population under-represented.
