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29-12-2016

The effect of a reduction in the opening hours of polling stations on turnout

Author: Sebastian Garmann

Published in: Public Choice | Issue 1-2/2017

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Abstract

In recent years, scholars and policymakers alike have discussed potential causes and consequences of low voter turnout. Election administration laws may provide means to encourage turnout that are of low cost and easily implementable. In this paper, I provide a policy evaluation of a change in an election administration law. Specifically, I estimate the causal effect of a reduction in the opening hours of polling stations on turnout. To this end, I make use of a policy change in a German state that cut the number of opening hours of polling stations. Using political units from an adjacent state with the same election dates and effectively the same election system as a control group in a difference-in-differences design, I find that reducing the opening hours of polling stations significantly reduces voter turnout.

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For example, in Germany, voter turnout in federal elections fell from 82.2% in 1998–71.1% in 2013. In 1972, voter turnout was at its highest level of 91.1%. At the local level in Germany, the decline was even more severe. In some states, turnout in local elections decreased by more than 20 percentage points in less than 20 years.

Charles and Stephens (2013), for example, report causal evidence that unemployment leads to a higher turnout. However, making people unemployed in order to increase turnout would clearly violate ethical norms. Moreover, it is often argued that compulsory voting violates the democratic ideal of individual freedom. For this reason, Abraham (1955, p. 33) regards compulsory voting as “undemocratic”.

Turnout might increase if the education level of citizens increases. However, such a policy initiative would take decades to lead to a higher turnout.

In both states considered herein, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, currently pay 21 Euro to polling assistants for a full Election Day.

According to Dropp (2012), more than one-fourth of abstainers in the US Current Population Survey cited conflicts with work or school schedules as the primary reason for not voting.

The election dates were June 10, 1979; June 17, 1984; June 18, 1989; June 12, 1994; and June 13, 1999.

At the same time (especially the same opening times of polling stations) and place as the municipal council elections, the county council is elected using the same procedure as the municipal council elections. However, county council elections clearly are less important than municipal council elections in the eyes of the voters. In general, the turnout at municipal council elections is higher than the turnout at county council elections. Thus, this election can be considered a kind of roll-off election. Voters regard the municipal council elections as more important, and vote in them more often, even though both are effectively on the same ballot (Dean 1965; Andersen et al. 2014).

The differences in political variables likely stem from the fact that local political associations play a much more important role in Rhineland-Palatinate than in Saarland. This is, however, a permanent difference between the two states and can be captured in difference-in-differences approaches by state- (or even county-) fixed effects.

In the robustness checks, I have also employed a logarithmic transformation \(\ln (\frac{\text{Turnout}}{{1 - {\text{Turnout}}}})\) as an alternative outcome variable (Geys 2006).

In non-reported robustness checks, I have also allowed for a non-linear relationship between population size and turnout as well as the number of eligible voters and turnout, respectively, by (1) including both variables in logarithmic form, and (2) using polynomials of both variables up to the third order. The results are not affected.

Implementing a wild-cluster bootstrap procedure at the state level likewise is not an option in the present setting, because there are only \(2^{G}\) potential combinations of the data at the group level (on which the bootstrap procedure relies). With \(G = 2\) groups, the bootstrap procedure can at best say that the p value is below 0.25 (Cameron and Miller 2015).

The lag length of the MA-term in the calculation of the Driscoll–Kraay standard errors is set to two by means of a heuristic criterion as presented in Hoechle (2007). Hoechle (2007) notes that this heuristic criterion often sets too short a lag length. I checked whether my results are sensitive to choosing longer lag lengths but found that this is not the case.

I have performed this averaging of the data both with and without de-trending the data first. The results do not differ. Note that for this approach, the number of pre-treatment periods must be equal to the number of post-treatment periods (Egger and Radulescu 2012). Therefore, I focus on the years 1984 and 1989 in the pre-treatment and the years 1994 and 1999 in the post-treatment period.

His results, however, can roughly be compared to my estimates only because he estimates a reduced form effect, i.e., the effect of eligibility for reduced polling hours on turnout. To calculate the effect of reduced polling hours on turnout in his setting, we would need to know the first-stage results, i.e., by how much the probability that a precinct indeed chooses reduced polling hours changes at the population threshold. As I have not found such information in his paper, I can provide only a rough comparison.

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Title: The effect of a reduction in the opening hours of polling stations on turnout
Author: Sebastian Garmann
Publication date: 29-12-2016
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Public Choice / Issue 1-2/2017
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-016-0399-3

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