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Political Behavior
Published in: Political Behavior 4/2016

30-01-2016 | Original Paper

Residential Mobility and Turnout: The Relevance of Social Costs, Timing and Education

Author: Jonas Hedegaard Hansen

Published in: Political Behavior | Issue 4/2016

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Abstract

Residential mobility has substantial negative effects on voter turnout. However, existing studies have been unable to disentangle whether this is due to social costs, informational costs or convenience costs that are related to re-registration. This article analyzes the relevance of the different costs by studying the effect of moving and reassignment to a new polling station in an automatic registration context and using a register-based panel dataset with validated turnout for 2.1 million citizens. The negative effect of moving on turnout does not differ substantially depending on the distance moved from the old neighborhood and it does not matter if citizens change municipality. Thus, the disruption of social ties is the main explanation for the negative effect of moving on turnout. Furthermore, the timing of residential mobility is important as the effect on turnout declines quickly after settling down. This illustrates that large events in citizens’ everyday life close to Election Day can distract them from going to the polling station. Finally, residential mobility mostly affects the turnout of less educated citizens. Consequentially, residential mobility increases inequalities in voter participation, which can be viewed as a democratic problem.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Citizens who move to a new municipality within nine days before the election need to have registered their new address with the authorities to be able to vote in their new municipality. It is normal practice to register a new address ahead of changing residence, as it is the basis for a large number of public service provisions. Changing one’s address is done online and takes only a few minutes. In case citizens miss this date, they will be registered to vote in their old municipality.
 
2
Voters can cast an early vote up to 3 months ahead of the elections by going to a pre-election polling place (e.g. a library). Citizens’ cannot use mail-in voting. In the 2013-elections, 5.3 % of the votes were cast as early votes (Bhatti et al. 2014b). The early voters are included in the analysis and it does not make any substantial difference if the analysis is conducted without these voters.
 
3
In Denmark, voting lists are normally destroyed shortly after the election. However, in 2009 and 2013, all municipalities were allowed and encouraged to send the lists in digital form to a team of researchers. In 2009, 44 municipalities delivered the voter files for almost all of their citizens, and all municipalities delivered the information in 2013 (for a more detailed description, see Bhatti and Hansen 2010; Bhatti et al. 2014b).
 
4
The data are stored on servers at Statistics Denmark. Due to security and privacy reasons, the data cannot be made available on the Internet. Researchers interested in replicating the findings are welcome to visit and work under supervision. Also, a number of other researchers from Danish research institutions have access to the data and can be helpful if questions arise. Please ask the author for references.
 
5
One noteworthy exception is Squire et al. (1987), in which a part of the analysis is based on the Current Population Survey (CPS), a dataset containing residential mobility information at a monthly level for app. 115,000 citizens. Unfortunately, the same dataset contains a limited number of politically relevant variables, and the authors do not have access to validated turnout for the sample. Knack and White (2000) uses CPS data as well but does not present results at a more detailed level than whether citizens have changed residence within a year before the election.
 
6
One might object that moving entails a number of practical tasks that take away focus from the election, which the reassigned citizens do not have to cope with. While this point most likely is correct and is in line with the idea of a distraction effect, it is not really on target regarding this part of the analysis, as the timing of residential change is included as a control variable (cf. Table 1 in Appendix). The question of timing and the potential distraction effect is explored under the next heading.
 
7
Breaking the moving variable into the three residential groups that were used in the previous part of the analysis results in the same pattern as presented in Fig. 4 (as shown in the Online Resource Figure A.1).
 
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Metadata
Title
Residential Mobility and Turnout: The Relevance of Social Costs, Timing and Education
Author
Jonas Hedegaard Hansen
Publication date
30-01-2016
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Political Behavior / Issue 4/2016
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9333-0

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