Benjamin Highton

Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States

In a democracy, voting is the most fundamental act of political participation and therefore holds a central location in the study of political behavior. One significant research tradition focuses on the relationship between registration and turnout and raises important and related questions. How do registration laws influence turnout levels? What types of people are most affected by them? What are the partisan implications of registration requirements? Spanning the late nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries, this essay places these questions in the appropriate theoretical context and then answers them. Previously Benjamin Highton was an APSA Congressional Fellow and worked for Senator Paul Wellstone on health and welfare policy. He appreciates the advice and criticism from Henry Brady, Jennifer Hochschild, Randolph Siverson, Raymond Wolfinger, and the anonymous referees for Perspectives on Politics .

Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation

This article investigates why Americans who move have lower voter turnout than those who stay put. Two hypotheses are drawn from the political science literature. One emphasizes the need to register at ones new address in order to vote. The other locates the cause of lower turnout in the disruption of social connections that results from moving. By distinguishing those who change residences within their communities from those who move outside of their communities, I test the hypotheses. The findings show that both types of moves affect turnout. However, changing residences appears to be more important than changing communitites. Thus it appears that the explanation for the relationship between moving and turnout derives more from the need to register after moving than the disruption of social ties.

Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993

Over-time and multivariate cross-sectional analyses of large survey samples are used to estimate the likely effects of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by examining turnout in those states where procedures comparable to any of the acts provisions were in force in 1992. In contrast to previous studies, we find that most state motor voter programs did not resemble the NVRA provision. We analyze one state program that did, and in addition use election-day registration as a surrogate, because it also provides one-trip voting. Our two approaches lead to estimates of turnout increases due to the motor voter provision of 4.7 and 8.7 percentage points, respectively. The lack of state counterparts to public agency registration prevents estimates of this provisions consequences. Eliminating purging for not voting will increase turnout by as much as 2 percentage points. Universal mail registration will have no effect. The turnout effects will be greatest among the two largest groups of current nonvoters: people under the age of 30 and those who moved within two years of election day. Neither group is politically distinctive, except for young peoples weaker identification with the major parties and greater affinity for third-party candidates.

Revisiting the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Political Sophistication

In politics, those who are politically sophisticated are advantaged in a variety of ways relative to those who are not. This paper analyzes the causes of political sophistication paying particular attention to the variable most commonly identified as the primary cause of differences within the mass public, educational attainment. Using panel data first collected before some respondents attended college, I show that there appears to be no significant effect of attending and graduating from college on political awareness. Differences in political sophistication evident after people attend college are already in place before anyone sets foot in a college classroom. Explaining political sophistication therefore requires attention to pre-adult causes. I elaborate an explanation and find that it accounts for a substantial portion of the spurious relationship between education and political sophistication.

Beyond the Roll-Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress

Most analyses of position taking in Congress focus on roll-call voting, where members of Congress (MCs) regularly cast votes, thereby regularly taking positions. Left largely unstudied has been position taking beyond the domain of rollcall voting. However, analyzing non-roll-call position taking raises interesting theoretical questions. Whereas most members cannot avoid taking positions (casting votes) on roll calls, outside the roll-call arena MCs have more discretion; they must decide whether or not to take a position at all. And, while roll-call voting is directly tied to policy consequences, the connection is weaker in non-roll-call position taking. These two distinguishing features of non-roll-call position taking motivate a variety of hypotheses about who takes positions and what positions they take. Our results reveal strong constituency links to both phenomena. The results also imply that party influence is greater on roll-call position taking. We interpret these findings in the context of leading theories of congressional behavior.

How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Citizens Registered to Vote

A well-established scholarly tradition links lower voting costs with higher turnout. Whereas previous research emphasized the costs imposed by requiring voter registration, our research assesses postregistration costs and state policies that can make it easier for registered citizens to vote. These policies include mailing each registrant a sample ballot and information about the location of his or her polling place, providing a longer voting day, and requiring firms to give their employees time off to vote. Using the 2000 Voter Supplement to the Current Population Survey, we find that all but the last of these provisions enhance turnout, especially by the young and the less educated. Compared to a state that does none of these things, the estimated turnout of high school dropouts is nearly 11 percentage points higher in a state with these “best practices”; their effect on young registrants is nearly 10 points. Because African American and Latino registrants are disproportionately younger and less educated, they would benefit disproportionately from universal adoption of such postregistration laws. We estimate that if every state adopted these best practices, overall turnout of those registered would increase approximately three percentage points.

The Long-Term Dynamics of Partisanship and Issue Orientations

Partisanship and issue orientations are among the foundational concepts for behavioral researchers. We seek to understand their causal relationship. One view suggests that party identification, as a central and long-standing affective orientation, influences citizens’ issue positions. Another view claims that issue orientations influence party identification. We take both theories into account in this article and argue that the direction of causality may depend upon the political context. Using the Political Socialization Panel Study, we analyze the long-term dynamic relationship between partisanship and issue orientations. The results from our cross-lagged structural equation models are inconsistent with a single, time-invariant, unidirectional causal story. The causal relationship between partisanship and issue orientations appears to depend upon the larger political context. In the early period from 1973 to 1982, partisanship causes issue orientations. In the later period, from 1982 to 1997, the causal...

Policy Polarization among Party Elites and the Significance of Political Awareness in the Mass Public

This article analyzes opinions about abortion, racial, and social welfare policies, comparing their determinants among citizens with different levels of political information over the past several decades. Hypothesizing that growing elite partisan polarization may have exacerbated the political implications of differences in political awareness, the authors examine how increasing clarity of party—policy linkages among political elites influences party—policy linkages in the mass public. The results show that only the well informed responded to the growing elite polarization by becoming more partisan in their opinions. Apparently, in the absence of the motivation to develop coherent opinions, even a simplification of the political environment does not close the gaps between those who are more and less aware about politics.

New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States

In this article, we address a number of unresolved questions about Latino electoral participation. First, we examine differences between Latinos and other groups and establish a persistent pattern of low Latino turnout that remains even after taking into account the fact that a large proportion of Latinos are not citizens and are therefore ineligible to vote. Then we investigate the extent to which differences in turnout between Latinos and other groups can be explained by standard socioeconomic variables. Finally, we consider whether there are meaningful differences in turnout between foreign-born and native-born Latino citizens and argue that framing the question in terms of a foreign-born/native-born dichotomy is misleading. Nativity status does have a powerful effect on turnout, but only when considered in conjunction how long foreign-born citizens have lived in the United States. Throughout, we distinguish the three largest Latino subgroups, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans.

Long Lines, Voting Machine Availability, and Turnout: The Case of Franklin County, Ohio in the 2004 Presidential Election

Within polling places, does the scarcity of voting machines cause longer lines and thereby dissuade some people from voting? Are voting machines scarce in some areas because turnout would be low, irrespective of the availability of voting machines? In Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the answers to these questions carried very real and significant political stakes. Consider the following from Franklin County, the second most populous county in the state. In precincts where voting machines were plentiful (i.e., where there were fewer registrants per available voting machine), turnout was especially high and John Kerrys share of the presidential vote was low. In contrast, in areas of machine scarcity (i.e., precincts with many registrants per available voting machine), turnout was lower and Kerrys vote share was higher. These relationships are shown in Figures 1A and 1B. Given the strong association between machine availability and the Kerry vote, if machine (un)availability was a cause of (low) turnout, then Kerry may very well have received fewer votes than he would have had more machines been available or had the distribution of available machines been less skewed toward precincts that were more supportive of George W. Bush. I appreciate input from SSRC Commission members Henry Brady, Martha Kropf, Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Michael Traugott with whom I collaborated on the SSRCs “Interim Report on Alleged Irregularities in the United States Presidential Election of 2 November 2004” ( Brady et al. 2004 ). I also thank Benjamin Bishin for comments on the paper. The Social Science Research Council and its staff, including Jason McNichol, Dashiell Flynn, and Sarah Alexander, provided generous support for this work. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily shared by other SSRC Commission members or the Social Science Research Council.