Voters, Non-Voters, and the Implications of Election Timing for Public Policy

45 Pages Posted: 19 Oct 2010

See all articles by Christopher R. Berry

Christopher R. Berry

University of Chicago - Harris School of Public Policy

Jacob E. Gersen

Harvard University

Date Written: September 22, 2010

Abstract

This paper makes use of variation in the timing of local elections to shed light on one of the core questions in democratic politics: what would happen if everyone voted? Does a low voter turnout rate imply that a small subset of special interest voters controls politics and policy? Or, are voters largely representative of non-voters such that neither the outcomes of elections nor resulting public policies would change even if everyone participated? Rather than rely on surveys of nonvoters to extrapolate their hypothetical behavior, we rely on a natural experiment created by a 1980s change in the California Election Code, which allowed school districts to change their elections from off-cycle to on-cycle. Because we are able to observe very large within-district changes in voter turnout resulting from changes in election timing, we are able to isolate the effect of turnout on policy outcomes, including teacher salaries and student achievement tests. Our analysis demonstrates that changes in voter turnout do affect public policy, but modestly.

Keywords: Election Turnout, Election Policy

Suggested Citation

Berry, Christopher R. and Gersen, Jacob E., Voters, Non-Voters, and the Implications of Election Timing for Public Policy (September 22, 2010). University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 536, University of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 324, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1693972 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1693972

Christopher R. Berry

University of Chicago - Harris School of Public Policy ( email )

1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

Jacob E. Gersen (Contact Author)

Harvard University ( email )

1875 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
124
Abstract Views
1,095
Rank
409,537
PlumX Metrics