Who Votes Now?: Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States

WHO VOTES NOW?

WHO VOTES NOW?

DEMOGRAPHICS, ISSUES, INEQUALITY, AND TURNOUT IN THE UNITED STATES

Jan E. Leighley

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Jonathan Nagler

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leighley, Jan E., 1960–

Who votes now? : demographics, issues, inequality and turnout in the United States / Jan E. Leighley, American University; Jonathan Nagler, New York University.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-15934-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-15934-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-15935-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-15935-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Voter turnout–United States–Statistics.

2. Political participation–United States–Statistics. 3. Elections–United States–Statistics.

I. Nagler, Jonathan. II. Title.

JK1967.L45 2013

324.973–dc23

2013016995

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

Printed on acid-free paper ∞

Typeset by S R Nova Pvt Ltd, Bangalore, India

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Jonathan dedicates this book to his parents, for encouraging reading and civic participation.

Jan dedicates this book to her daughter, Anna Johnson.

Yes, I do … more than you know.

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

Who votes? And does it matter?

These are not new questions in the study of American politics, but they continue to be important ones, and they motivate what we do in this book.

As the title suggests, we owe an enormous intellectual debt to Ray Wolfinger and Steve Rosenstone, who wrote what is now a classic text on voter turnout in the United States, Who Votes?¹ We have written before on the demographics of turnout, and continue to believe that the demographics of turnout are inherently important to questions of democracy and representation.

Intellectually, Who Votes? has had staying power. In addition to a rich description of patterns of turnout across demographic subgroups, Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980) provided insightful analyses that reflected on common beliefs about every demographic characteristic they investigated. In addition, they emphasized the importance of election rules (especially the closing date for registering to vote) as deterrents to voter turnout. Their last chapter concluded on a somewhat surprising note when they suggested that who votes is not that important—that voters and nonvoters have similar preferences, and that if everyone voted, there would be few changes to political outcomes.²

Much of what Wolfinger and Rosenstone demonstrated stimulated other scholars to take a closer look. In short, their comprehensive description of patterns of turnout across a wide range of demographic subgroups became a theoretical and empirical springboard for subsequent research. Much of this subsequent research expanded on the theoretical interpretations of Wolfinger and Rosenstone, while some drilled down to focus in greater detail on the demographic characteristics of interest and changes in their distribution over time.³ Others, most notably Rosenstone and Hansen (1993), reframed the study of voter turnout to emphasize the importance of campaign context and political elites (e.g., candidate and party mobilization efforts, issues and party competitiveness) as key determinants of voter turnout.⁴

Aside from demographics, Who Votes? also initiated sustained attention to whether the legal rules governing elections influence how many vote, as well as who votes. Wolfinger and Rosenstone’s (1980) extensive data collection on state election laws and their implementation has been updated in various ways by those focusing on whether election laws influence turnout.⁵ Whatever their focus, this wide range of studies shares a common point of departure: Wolfinger and Rosenstone’s key observation that demographics are central to understanding voter turnout.

But Wolfinger and Rosenstone’s classic work was limited to one presidential election–an election that is now forty years past. And dramatic changes in the demographics of the U.S. population over this long period, along with fundamental changes in political campaigns (e.g., changes in the use and availability of new media, and increased campaign spending) and election laws (e.g., the increase in the availability and use of absentee voting, early voting, and election day registration) suggested to us that there was more work to do.

Others, of course, have considered this intersection of demographics and political engagement—most notably Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s (1995) exhaustive and authoritative study of the demographics of participation other than voting, and, more recently, their study of political voice (Schlozman, Verba, & Brady 2012). Both of these studies frame the enduring and central importance of demographics to political behavior in light of normative concerns regarding inequality: if the unequal distribution of economic and social resources has political consequences, it surely must be evidenced in who casts ballots, who engages in political activities, and who expresses political voice.

We, too, frame our investigation of voter turnout in presidential elections in the United States between 1972 and 2008—a period of increasing economic inequality—in light of these normative concerns about economic and political inequality. We also wanted to examine whether over this same period changes in electoral laws and the nature of the choices offered by the parties had led to changes in turnout. We hope our arguments and evidence regarding demographic patterns of turnout over time, and whether election laws or political candidates can enhance the representativeness of voters, speak not only to scholars but also to citizens, candidates, and journalists. We would not have written this book if we did not think that who votes matters.

1. Published in 1980, their analysis relied on data from the 1972 Current Population Survey—the first scholars who embarked on such a huge data analysis effort. Given computing resources of the day, Wolfinger and Rosenstone could only use a subset of cases from the CPS.

2. Wolfinger and Rosenstone recognized that future political cleavages could change such that the demographic differences they described between voters and nonvoters could have meaningful policy implications.

3. See, for example, Abrajano & Alvarez (2010); Barreto (2005); Cassel (2002); Kam, Zechmeister, & Wilking (2008); Leighley & Nagler (2007); Pacheco & Plutzer (2007); Ramakrishnan (2005); Teixeira (1987); and Tenn (2007).

4. See, more recently, Bergan et al. (2005); Goldstein & Ridout (2002); Holbrook & McClurg (2005); and Parry et al. (2008).

5. See, for example, Brians & Grofman (2001); Hanmer (2009); Knack (2001), Knack & White (2001); and Springer (forthcoming).

Acknowledgments

Our work on the study of voter turnout began over two decades ago. The effort could not have been sustained without support (intellectual, financial, and otherwise) from many quarters.

First, Ray Wolfinger kindly met with us in 1990 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, when we were first starting our work on studying turnout. His willingness to take time to meet with two junior faculty he did not know, based only on our shared interest in voter turnout, was incredibly generous.

Second, our academic homes during the writing of the book—including New York University, the University of Arizona, American University and, for one pleasant semester for one of us, the European University Institute—provided both financial and scholarly support in many ways. Of course, the most valuable support we received was from our colleagues, for both specific comments as well as general advice on related papers and the book manuscript in its many incarnations. A half semester spent at NYU–Abu Dhabi by Jonathan turned out to be especially productive.

In addition, each of these universities provided outstanding research assistants, without whom the book would be impossible. To name a few: at NYU, Melanie Goodrich provided valuable assistance with coding of CPS data; Adam Bonica wrote very flexible code that let us redo analyses as quickly as we updated data; Nick Beauchamp performed several useful updates to the code base; Andrew Therriault was our source for expertise on Annenberg data; and Lindsey Cormack and Dominik Duell both provided valuable assistance with National Election Studies (NES) data. At the University of Arizona, Jessica McGary provided timely assistance with our initial graphs, and at American University, Amun Nadeem, Michele Frazier, Carrie Morton, and Chelsea Berry provided excellent assistance with background research and supplementary data collection and copyediting.

Third, we gratefully recognize the Pew Charitable Trusts through the Pew Center on the States for providing grant support to us, along with our collaborators Dan Tokaji and Nate Cemenska at the Ohio State University School of Law, for collecting data on state registration and election laws. We rely heavily on this data in chapter 4. We especially appreciate the support of Zach Markovits at Pew, who guided our project to successful completion. The work of Pew’s Center on the States continues to be important to a better understanding of democracy in the United States. and we were fortunate to be a part of that work. We also thank Steve Carbo and Demos for providing feedback and constant reminders of the importance of our work, and for giving one of us a chance to present research to policy makers. Over the course of our research on turnout one of us has testified in federal court on the effectiveness of election day registration, and one of us has testified before Congress on the effectiveness of election day registration. We appreciate the opportunities we have had to demonstrate the relevance of our research to important policy matters.

Our travels away from home included invitations to numerous departments and conferences to present our work; we undoubtedly returned from these visits understanding more about turnout and how to write this book than when we began. These colloquia included talks at American University, Columbia University, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Hebrew University, the Institut d’ Analisi Economica in Barcelona, the European University Institute, the University of Maryland, Princeton University, Temple University, the University of California–Davis, and the D.C. Area Workshop on American Politics.

We also thank Chris Wlezien and Peter Enns, who invited us to Cornell University’s conference, Homogeneity and Heterogeneity in Public Opinion; Margaret Levi, Jack Knight, and Jim Johnson, who invited us to the Designing Democratic Government conference sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation; and Mike Alvarez and Bernie Grofman, who invited us to a conference on post–Bush versus Gore electoral reform.

Most of the chapters in this book were initially presented at annual meetings and conferences such as those of the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, and the Southern Political Science Association. Over the years many of the chapters were revised and presented again, imposing on an ever larger number of discussants and fellow panelists. We regret that we cannot recall all of the discussants to whom we are indebted, nor all of the panel participants.

Most recently, we appreciate the comments of Michael Hanmer, Mike Martinez, Betsy Sinclair, Theda Skocpol, and Lynn Vavreck at these meetings. Mike Alvarez deserves special thanks for the many useful insights he has offered in discussions of voter turnout and elections. Jen Lawless, Danny Hayes, and Matt Wright also provided excellent feedback in extended discussions of the project. We thank Orit Kedar for her persistence in offering good advice, even when it was not being followed. Jonathan thanks many coauthors on other projects for their patience while time was taken away to work on this book. And Jan thanks Bill Mishler, coeditor of the Journal of Politics, for his patience as Jan’s attention was focused on completing this manuscript while journal submissions continued unabated. He is one of many friends and family members who have taken a backseat over many weekends and holidays, especially, as we pushed to complete the book.

As with anyone who works on turnout in the United States, we owe a huge debt to Michael McDonald for the work he does maintaining state-level data. We appreciate his responsiveness to our many questions regarding turnout data as well as many discussions about the research questions we share in common.

In addition, several of our colleagues generously took the time to read various chapters of a draft of the manuscript and provide valuable feedback, including Marisa Abrajano, Lindsey Cormack, Bob Huckfeldt, Jennifer Oser, Costas Panagopoulos, Elizabeth Rigby, and Tetsuya Matsubayashi. And going well beyond what we could reasonably expect in effort and helpfulness, Jamie Druckman and Pat Egan gave us exceptionally useful feedback on a draft of the entire manuscript. We also appreciate Chuck Myers’s suggestions, which helped us sharpen the presentation of our arguments, and the patient and helpful production staff at Princeton University Press—especially production editor Karen Fortgang and copy editor Brian Bendlin—who were critical in the last stage of revisions, which, of course, took longer than we had all hoped. And despite all the excellent advice of our colleagues, they bear no responsibility for any remaining errors—that responsibility is ours.

WHO VOTES NOW?

One

Introduction

After every presidential election, commentators lament the low voter turnout rate in the United States, suggesting that there is something wrong with a democracy in which only about 60 percent of its citizens vote. Yet there is little public consternation over the fact that those who do show up at the polls are disproportionately wealthy: while nearly 80 percent of high-income citizens vote, barely 50 percent of low-income citizens do.¹ Given the dramatic increase in economic inequality in the United States over the past thirty years, the silence on this point is all the more striking: apparently the important question for pundits and journalists is not who votes but how many vote.

Contrast this silence with the strident debates regarding voter identification laws passed after the 2008 presidential election. Low voter turnout aside, many state legislatures passed laws requiring individuals to provide positive identification when voting on election day. While supporters of these laws argued they were intended to protect the integrity of elections, opponents countered that the laws were partisan efforts to depress the turnout of liberal-leaning citizens who also happen to be least likely to already have identification documents—that is, the poor, and racial and ethnic minorities. The common assumption in this debate, whatever the legislative intent, is: who votes matters.

The intensity of this debate even up to a month prior to election day in 2012 was likely fueled by pollsters’ predictions that the presidential race seemed to be too close to call. In September, media reports