Abstract
Voter participation rates vary widely across the 50 states. We seek to identify a source of this interstate variation, focusing upon the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 general elections. Of note is that the latter two general elections featured a minority (i.e., African-American) nominee for president from one of the major political parties. Within the context of the rational voter model, we hypothesize that the presence of a minority candidate atop the ticket will boost minorities’ expected net benefits from voting, with the result that minority voter participation will be higher. Based on cross-sectional fixed-effects estimations, we find that states’ voter participation rates were unaffected by the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2000 and 2004 election cycles, while states’ voter participation rates were positively related to the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2008 and 2012 election cycles.
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Christopher Duquette’s affiliation with The MITRE Corporation is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to convey or imply MITRE’s concurrence with, or support for, the positions, opinions, or viewpoints expressed by the authors.
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Cebula, R.J., Duquette, C.M. & Boylan, R. Panel Data Analysis of Regional Differentials in the Registered Voter Turnout Rate and the Expected Benefits of Voting for Minorities. Atl Econ J 45, 29–34 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-016-9527-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-016-9527-1