Michael P Mcdonald
Biographic Data
| ID | 296665 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael P Mcdonald |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael P |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdonald |
| SIGNATURE | MCDONALD M P |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3717-4405 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 441 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Campus Voting During the Covid-19 Pandemic
How did the pandemic impact turnout of young voters living in university communities? Leveraging the mandatory vacating of Florida college students living on campuses and drawing on administrative data from Florida’s voter file, we argue that on-campus registered young voters who had to leave their university housing in the days prior to Florida’s 2020 Presidential Preference Primary (PPP) were less likely to turn out compared to adjacent off-cam…
A Method to Audit the Assignment of Registered Voters to Districts and Precincts
Electoral boundaries are an integral part of election administration. District boundaries delineate which legislative election voters are eligible to participate in, and precinct boundaries identify, in many localities, where voters cast in-person ballots on Election Day. Election officials are tasked with resolving a tremendously large number of intersections of registered voters with overlapping electoral boundaries. Any large-scale data projec…
Verifying Voter Registration Records: Part of Special Symposium on Election Sciences
This study investigates the reliability of Florida’s voter registration files through a phone survey, asking respondents to verify their records. We find 17.7% of registrants fail to verify at least one identifying piece of information. Applying the total survey error (TSE) framework, we classify these errors as due to coverage error, measurement error, or processing error. These inconsistencies create election administration and campaign ineffic…
The Turnout Gap in Surveys: Explanations and Solutions
Postelection surveys regularly overestimate voter turnout by 10 points or more. This article provides the first comprehensive documentation of the turnout gap in three major ongoing surveys (the General Social Survey, Current Population Survey, and American National Election Studies), evaluates explanations for it, interprets its significance, and suggests means to continue evaluating and improving survey measurements of turnout. Accuracy was gre…
The Public Mapping Project: How Public Participation Can Revolutionize Redistricting
Small Donors in Congressional Elections
Candidates raise substantial sums of money to compete in federal elections. Scholars and election observers are concerned by potential corruption related to the reliance on donors who make significant contributions. One reform effort to counterbalance large donors is encouraging small donor participation. Still, some worry that ideologically extreme candidates are best able to raise small donations. We analyze internal U.S. Federal Elections Comm…
The Public Mapping Project: How Public Participation Can Revolutionize Redistricting
The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal is an initiative of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University. It annually recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. This book unveils the Public Mapping Project, which developed DistrictBuilder, an open-source software redistricting application designed …
Redistricting by Formula: An Ohio Reform Experiment
In the last decade, Ohio reformers advocated redistricting by formula: selecting the redistricting plan that scores best on a predefined objective scoring function that combines prima facie neutral criteria with political goals of plan fairness and district competition. In the post-2010 redistricting, these reformers hosted a public competition where prizes were awarded to the best legal plan scored on the reformers’ formula. The submitted plans …
When Boundaries Collide
Scholars have long merged election and census geography to correlate census demographics and election results to infer political behavior (Ogburn and Goltra 1919; Gosnell and Gill 1935; Key 1949). Increasing accessibility of geospatially defined election data provides a valuable tool to understanding voting behavior in the United States at geographic levels unavailable to previous scholars. Here, we describe these data and examine four methods to…
Components of partisan bias originating from single-member districts in multi-party systems: An application to Mexico
Patterns and Perceptions of Dextromethorphan Use in Adult Members of an Online Dextromethorphan Community
Dextromethorphan (DXM) is a widely available antitussive that has, at elevated dose levels, euphoric and dissociative effects. This article presents the reported patterns and preferences of DXM use, and perceptions of DXM use among adult members of an online DXM community. Analyses were conducted of quantitative and qualitative responses from nine female and 43 male individuals, aged 18-63 years old. All respondents reported illegal and DXM drug …
Voter Turnout in Presidential Nominating Contests
Presidential elections are conducted in two stages. The November general election is proceeded by a series of contests where delegates are selected to national party conventions, which is where the parties select their candidates for the fall election. These nominating contests’ political environments vary: the rules regarding who can participate; the levels of electoral competition, which are related to when they are held; and that other offices…
Presidential Vote within State Legislative Districts
Presidential vote shares in legislative districts are widely available for congressional districts and are often used by scholars in their research. Here, I describe the general methodology to construct statewide vote shares within districts and apply these methods to a new database of presidential vote shares within 36 states' legislative districts
Interview Mode Effects: The Case of Exit Polls and Early Voting
Journal Article Interview Mode Effects: The Case of Exit Polls and Early Voting Get access Michael P. McDonald, Michael P. McDonald * Michael p. Mcdonald is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA. Matthew P. Thornburg is a doctoral candidate at George Mason University. The authors would like to thank Joe Lenski, …
Perceptions vs. Actual Exposure to Electoral Competition and Effects on Political Participation
Few scholars have examined perceptions of electoral competition, and those who have (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974) find no link between perceptions and voting behavior. We find that individuals' perceptions of electoral competition are related to exposure to a close race in their U.S. House district but do not match reality. This is because perceptions are colored by "wishful thinking" in that individuals believe their favored candidate will win a c…
Voter Turnout in the 2010 Midterm Election
I place national turnout rates in historical perspective and investigate what state turnout rates may tell us about what factors are related to higher levels of voter participation. In midterm elections compared to presidential election, voter turnout is lower among all groups, but more so for young people. I discuss the implications of younger citizens' disengagement in midterm elections in light of an increasing gap in support for the political…
The 2010 Midterm Elections: Signs and Portents for the Decennial Redistricting
The 2010 midterm elections are consequential not only in terms of the candidates who were elected to office, but also in terms of the government policies that they will enact. High on the list of important policies is the decennial practice of drawing new redistricting plans for legislative offices. A new census reveals population shifts that will result in a reallocation of congressional seats among the states through apportionment and—following…
Pracademics”: Mixing an Academic Career with Practical Politics
College professors are evaluated for promotion and tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. All too often, however, service is considered the poor cousin of the trio. In political science in particular, we believe that this imbalance is detrimental to the individual scholar, our students, the discipline, and the general public. The goal of this symposium is to contribute to what we see as a nas…
The Political Scientist as Expert Witness
Political scientists serve in courtrooms as expert witnesses on many topics related to their professional training: elections, same-sex marriages, employer sanctions for hiring undocumented aliens, school desegregation, political asylum requests, property rights, and racial profiling, among many others. It is not by chance that we—the authors—have chosen to testify as experts in cases concerning elections (see also Cain 1999). Election-related ca…
The Return of the Voter: Voter Turnout in the 2008 Presidential Election
The presidential turnout rate for those eligible to vote was 61.6% in 2008, which marks the third consecutive increase in presidential turnout rates since the modern low point of 51.7% in 1996. Turnout is no longer declining if it ever was and has reverted to the 'high' levels experienced during the 1950s and 1960s. This challenges many theories posited to explain turnout declines. I explore election trends among the states in hopes to provide cl…
Portable Voter Registration
Regulating Redistricting
As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennial political ritual of equalizing legislative district population as revealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatures will grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with the politically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators, party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerable time, effort, and money on their obsession with district bounda…
Rocking the House: Competition and Turnout in the 2006 Midterm Election
Despite a national tide for the Democrats in the 2006 midterms that increased the number of competitive congressional races, national voter turnout rose only slightly. Consistent with previous findings, higher turnout in some states reflected increased competition in statewide races for Governor and U.S. Senate. Unexpected surprises, however, lurked among individual congressional races. Voter turnout in highly partisan and closely contested congr…
How to Set a Random Clock: Remarks on Earnest (2006)
We read with interest David C. Earnest's recent (July 2006) PS article about the pedagogical challenges surrounding the statistical computation of pseudo-random numbers (PRNGs). We write to clarify some issues regarding the testing and setting of PRNG seeds, and to direct readers' attention to a set of resources for configuring computationally accurate simulations and statistical analyses
American Voter Turnout: An Institutional Perspective by David Hill
The Myth of the Vanishing Voter
The apparent decline in voter participation in national elections since 1972 is an illusion created by using the Bureau of the Census estimate of the voting-age population as the denominator of the turnout rate. We construct a more accurate estimate of those eligible to vote, from 1948-2000, using government statistical series to adjust for ineligible but included groups, such as noncitizens and felons, and eligible but excluded groups, such as o…
A Comparative Analysis of Redistricting Institutions in the United States, 2001-02
Legislative redistricting is among the most intensely fought battles in American politics. Through redistricting, political parties seek to control government, incumbents seek job security, and minority groups seek representation. I explore how the various United States redistricting institutions, and the political actors who operate within them, determined the outcomes of the 2001-02 redistricting cycle. I categorize these institutions into two …
On the Overreport Bias of the National Election Study Turnout Rate
Consumers of the National Election Study (NES) should be concerned if the survey has a bias that is increasing with time. A recent article by Barry Burden claims that for presidential elections, there is an increasing overreport bias, or turnout gap, between the NES turnout rate and the observed turnout rate caused by declining NES response rates. I show that the increasing turnout gap is an artifact of the universes these two turnout rates are b…
Congress and America's Political Development: The Transformation of the Post Office from Patronage to Service
Students of American political development portray the transformation of the bureaucracy from patronage to service as the handiwork of progressive presidents. In this article we explore Congress' programmatic contribution to the transformation of the bureaucracy. Specifically, we examine the development of rural free delivery (RFD) during the 1890's. The early administrative history of RFD and a statistical analysis of initial route allocations i…
Portable Voter Registration
A New Look at Split-Ticket Outcomes for House and President: The Comparative Midpoints Model
We argue that conservative districts that go Democratic for the House should be likely to choose a Republican for president, while liberal districts represented by a Republican should be likely to opt for a Democrat for president. We test these and related predictions about split-ticket voting with election data from the eight presidential elections between 1964 and 1992. We show that ideological differences in the estimated location of the distr…
Drawing the Line on District Competition
In “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” in this issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning (2006) argue that redistricting is not responsible for the decline in the number of competitive districts, defined as a district with a near balance of partisanship. Further, the authors claim that non-partisan redistricting institutions are not correlated with the number of competitive districts. The …
The Turnout Rate among Eligible Voters in the States, 1980–2000
Aggregate voter turnout rates in the United States have been used in many political science studies, as both a dependent and an independent variable. Most of these studies use the voting-age population as the denominator in their turnout rate measure. However, the voting-age population is not the same as the population of eligible voters. I demonstrate why this distinction matters and outline the steps to construct the voting-eligible population …
When Boundaries Collide
Scholars have long merged election and census geography to correlate census demographics and election results to infer political behavior (Ogburn and Goltra 1919; Gosnell and Gill 1935; Key 1949). Increasing accessibility of geospatially defined election data provides a valuable tool to understanding voting behavior in the United States at geographic levels unavailable to previous scholars. Here, we describe these data and examine four methods to…
The Turnout Gap in Surveys: Explanations and Solutions
Postelection surveys regularly overestimate voter turnout by 10 points or more. This article provides the first comprehensive documentation of the turnout gap in three major ongoing surveys (the General Social Survey, Current Population Survey, and American National Election Studies), evaluates explanations for it, interprets its significance, and suggests means to continue evaluating and improving survey measurements of turnout. Accuracy was gre…
Perceptions vs. Actual Exposure to Electoral Competition and Effects on Political Participation
Few scholars have examined perceptions of electoral competition, and those who have (Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974) find no link between perceptions and voting behavior. We find that individuals' perceptions of electoral competition are related to exposure to a close race in their U.S. House district but do not match reality. This is because perceptions are colored by "wishful thinking" in that individuals believe their favored candidate will win a c…
From Crayons to Computers: The Evolution of Computer Use in Redistricting
Following the most recent round of redistricting, observers across the political spectrum warned that computing technology had fundamentally changed redistricting, for the worse. They are concerned that computers enable the creation of finely crafted redistricting plans that promote partisan and career goals, to the detriment of electoral competition, and that, ultimately, thwart voters’ ability to express their will through the ballot box. In th…
Verifying Voter Registration Records: Part of Special Symposium on Election Sciences
This study investigates the reliability of Florida’s voter registration files through a phone survey, asking respondents to verify their records. We find 17.7% of registrants fail to verify at least one identifying piece of information. Applying the total survey error (TSE) framework, we classify these errors as due to coverage error, measurement error, or processing error. These inconsistencies create election administration and campaign ineffic…
Interview Mode Effects: The Case of Exit Polls and Early Voting
Journal Article Interview Mode Effects: The Case of Exit Polls and Early Voting Get access Michael P. McDonald, Michael P. McDonald * Michael p. Mcdonald is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, USA. Matthew P. Thornburg is a doctoral candidate at George Mason University. The authors would like to thank Joe Lenski, …
Replication with Attention to Numerical Accuracy
Numerical issues matter in statistical analysis. Small errors occur when numbers are translated from paper and pencil into the binary world of computers. Surprisingly, these errors may be propagated and magnified through binary calculations, eventually producing statistical estimates far from the truth. In this replication and extension article, we look at one method of verifying the accuracy of statistical estimates by running these same data an…
Small Donors in Congressional Elections
Candidates raise substantial sums of money to compete in federal elections. Scholars and election observers are concerned by potential corruption related to the reliance on donors who make significant contributions. One reform effort to counterbalance large donors is encouraging small donor participation. Still, some worry that ideologically extreme candidates are best able to raise small donations. We analyze internal U.S. Federal Elections Comm…
Pracademics”: Mixing an Academic Career with Practical Politics
College professors are evaluated for promotion and tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. All too often, however, service is considered the poor cousin of the trio. In political science in particular, we believe that this imbalance is detrimental to the individual scholar, our students, the discipline, and the general public. The goal of this symposium is to contribute to what we see as a nas…
The Return of the Voter: Voter Turnout in the 2008 Presidential Election
The presidential turnout rate for those eligible to vote was 61.6% in 2008, which marks the third consecutive increase in presidential turnout rates since the modern low point of 51.7% in 1996. Turnout is no longer declining if it ever was and has reverted to the 'high' levels experienced during the 1950s and 1960s. This challenges many theories posited to explain turnout declines. I explore election trends among the states in hopes to provide cl…
Regulating Redistricting
As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennial political ritual of equalizing legislative district population as revealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatures will grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with the politically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators, party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerable time, effort, and money on their obsession with district bounda…
Up, Up and Away! Voter Participation in the 2004 Presidential Election
A record 122.3 million people, or 60.0% of those eligible, cast a vote for president in 2004. In this essay, I examine variation in voter participation among the states. I find that electoral competition in the battleground states was associated with higher turnout rates, and that where competition at the presidential level was not present, an amendment banning gay marriage or an interesting Senate election is related to higher voter turnout
A Method to Audit the Assignment of Registered Voters to Districts and Precincts
Electoral boundaries are an integral part of election administration. District boundaries delineate which legislative election voters are eligible to participate in, and precinct boundaries identify, in many localities, where voters cast in-person ballots on Election Day. Election officials are tasked with resolving a tremendously large number of intersections of registered voters with overlapping electoral boundaries. Any large-scale data projec…
Presidential Vote within State Legislative Districts
Presidential vote shares in legislative districts are widely available for congressional districts and are often used by scholars in their research. Here, I describe the general methodology to construct statewide vote shares within districts and apply these methods to a new database of presidential vote shares within 36 states' legislative districts
Re-Drawing the Line on District Competition
I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning's (2006b) rejoinder to my critique of their article appearing in this same issue entitled “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” (2006a). We should have had a scholarly debate that informed the profession and raised interesting questions in one of the widest read journals. Instead, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning mischaracterize my arguments as …
California Recall Voting: Nuggets of California Gold for Voting Behavior
Professor McDonald analyzes voter participation in the 2003 California recall election. He places participation in the election into context, and finds it was not as high as predicted. He further finds intriguing evidence that punch card balloting leads to higher error rates, and that touch screen voting may reduce the degree of abstention for lower ballot position contests
Redistricting by Formula: An Ohio Reform Experiment
In the last decade, Ohio reformers advocated redistricting by formula: selecting the redistricting plan that scores best on a predefined objective scoring function that combines prima facie neutral criteria with political goals of plan fairness and district competition. In the post-2010 redistricting, these reformers hosted a public competition where prizes were awarded to the best legal plan scored on the reformers’ formula. The submitted plans …
Case Studies: Which Clients Should a Sheltered Workshop Serve
Michael McDonald, Stanley S. Herr, Case Studies: Which Clients Should a Sheltered Workshop Serve?, The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 14, No. 5, Autonomy, Paternalism, and Community (Oct., 1984), pp. 52-54
A lawyer’s brief against litigating academic disputes
L'eroe che pensa: Disavventure dell'impegno
Il Mestiere Del Critico: Una Intervista a Mario Luzi
Congress and America's Political Development: The Transformation of the Post Office from Patronage to Service
Students of American political development portray the transformation of the bureaucracy from patronage to service as the handiwork of progressive presidents. In this article we explore Congress' programmatic contribution to the transformation of the bureaucracy. Specifically, we examine the development of rural free delivery (RFD) during the 1890's. The early administrative history of RFD and a statistical analysis of initial route allocations i…
A New Look at Split-Ticket Outcomes for House and President: The Comparative Midpoints Model
We argue that conservative districts that go Democratic for the House should be likely to choose a Republican for president, while liberal districts represented by a Republican should be likely to opt for a Democrat for president. We test these and related predictions about split-ticket voting with election data from the eight presidential elections between 1964 and 1992. We show that ideological differences in the estimated location of the distr…
Choosing Reliable Statistical Software
Should we trust the results of our statistical computations? Closely following the development of the mainframe computer, Longley (1967) criticized the accuracy of the first regression programs. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, similar comments echoed for each new generation of statistical software. In a recent criticism, McCullough and Vinod (1999) argue that commonly used statistical packages may give “horrendously inaccurate” results, …
The Myth of the Vanishing Voter
The apparent decline in voter participation in national elections since 1972 is an illusion created by using the Bureau of the Census estimate of the voting-age population as the denominator of the turnout rate. We construct a more accurate estimate of those eligible to vote, from 1948-2000, using government statistical series to adjust for ineligible but included groups, such as noncitizens and felons, and eligible but excluded groups, such as o…
The Turnout Rate among Eligible Voters in the States, 1980–2000
Aggregate voter turnout rates in the United States have been used in many political science studies, as both a dependent and an independent variable. Most of these studies use the voting-age population as the denominator in their turnout rate measure. However, the voting-age population is not the same as the population of eligible voters. I demonstrate why this distinction matters and outline the steps to construct the voting-eligible population …
Numerical Issues in Statistical Computing for the Social Scientist
California Recall Voting: Nuggets of California Gold for Voting Behavior
Professor McDonald analyzes voter participation in the 2003 California recall election. He places participation in the election into context, and finds it was not as high as predicted. He further finds intriguing evidence that punch card balloting leads to higher error rates, and that touch screen voting may reduce the degree of abstention for lower ballot position contests
Replication with Attention to Numerical Accuracy
Numerical issues matter in statistical analysis. Small errors occur when numbers are translated from paper and pencil into the binary world of computers. Surprisingly, these errors may be propagated and magnified through binary calculations, eventually producing statistical estimates far from the truth. In this replication and extension article, we look at one method of verifying the accuracy of statistical estimates by running these same data an…
On the Overreport Bias of the National Election Study Turnout Rate
Consumers of the National Election Study (NES) should be concerned if the survey has a bias that is increasing with time. A recent article by Barry Burden claims that for presidential elections, there is an increasing overreport bias, or turnout gap, between the NES turnout rate and the observed turnout rate caused by declining NES response rates. I show that the increasing turnout gap is an artifact of the universes these two turnout rates are b…
A Redistricting Odyssey
Scholars have long been fascinated with how rearranging voters into districts affects the power of political parties, the careers of incumbents, and the representation of minorities. In this special issue, “Electoral Redistricting,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly brings together articles that touch on the three subfields of redistricting research: redistricting to advance the interests of partisans, incumbents, and racial groups. SPPQ is an …
Up, Up and Away! Voter Participation in the 2004 Presidential Election
A record 122.3 million people, or 60.0% of those eligible, cast a vote for president in 2004. In this essay, I examine variation in voter participation among the states. I find that electoral competition in the battleground states was associated with higher turnout rates, and that where competition at the presidential level was not present, an amendment banning gay marriage or an interesting Senate election is related to higher voter turnout
A Comparative Analysis of Redistricting Institutions in the United States, 2001-02
Legislative redistricting is among the most intensely fought battles in American politics. Through redistricting, political parties seek to control government, incumbents seek job security, and minority groups seek representation. I explore how the various United States redistricting institutions, and the political actors who operate within them, determined the outcomes of the 2001-02 redistricting cycle. I categorize these institutions into two …
From Crayons to Computers: The Evolution of Computer Use in Redistricting
Following the most recent round of redistricting, observers across the political spectrum warned that computing technology had fundamentally changed redistricting, for the worse. They are concerned that computers enable the creation of finely crafted redistricting plans that promote partisan and career goals, to the detriment of electoral competition, and that, ultimately, thwart voters’ ability to express their will through the ballot box. In th…
Rocking the House: Competition and Turnout in the 2006 Midterm Election
Despite a national tide for the Democrats in the 2006 midterms that increased the number of competitive congressional races, national voter turnout rose only slightly. Consistent with previous findings, higher turnout in some states reflected increased competition in statewide races for Governor and U.S. Senate. Unexpected surprises, however, lurked among individual congressional races. Voter turnout in highly partisan and closely contested congr…
How to Set a Random Clock: Remarks on Earnest (2006)
We read with interest David C. Earnest's recent (July 2006) PS article about the pedagogical challenges surrounding the statistical computation of pseudo-random numbers (PRNGs). We write to clarify some issues regarding the testing and setting of PRNG seeds, and to direct readers' attention to a set of resources for configuring computationally accurate simulations and statistical analyses
American Voter Turnout: An Institutional Perspective by David Hill
Re-Drawing the Line on District Competition
I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning's (2006b) rejoinder to my critique of their article appearing in this same issue entitled “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” (2006a). We should have had a scholarly debate that informed the profession and raised interesting questions in one of the widest read journals. Instead, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning mischaracterize my arguments as …
Drawing the Line on District Competition
In “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” in this issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning (2006) argue that redistricting is not responsible for the decline in the number of competitive districts, defined as a district with a near balance of partisanship. Further, the authors claim that non-partisan redistricting institutions are not correlated with the number of competitive districts. The …
Regulating Redistricting
As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennial political ritual of equalizing legislative district population as revealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatures will grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with the politically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators, party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerable time, effort, and money on their obsession with district bounda…
Portable Voter Registration
The Return of the Voter: Voter Turnout in the 2008 Presidential Election
The presidential turnout rate for those eligible to vote was 61.6% in 2008, which marks the third consecutive increase in presidential turnout rates since the modern low point of 51.7% in 1996. Turnout is no longer declining if it ever was and has reverted to the 'high' levels experienced during the 1950s and 1960s. This challenges many theories posited to explain turnout declines. I explore election trends among the states in hopes to provide cl…
Political science (36 works) · Politics (33 works) · Law (31 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (30 works) · Law (22 works) · Voting (22 works) · Economics (21 works) · Public Administration (21 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Public Administration (14 works)