Why do we vote?
Why do we vote?
This chapter investigates how young voters’ political participation influenced their household members during the 2012 US general election. Despite the importance, few studies have established the social effects in voter participation in high-salience elections such as US general elections. I consolidate voter files from 24 states, matching teenagers who turned eighteen around the 2012 election day to nearly 1 million of their household members. To address endogeneity, I use an instrumental variables approach, utilizing teenagers’ voting eligibility as an instrument for their turnout decisions. In the baseline estimation, a teenager who votes increases their household member’s voting likelihood by 1.9 percentage points (pp). This effect is consistent in 15 of the 24 individual states. Subgroup analysis shows a small but significant effect at 1.1 pp for household members with a high propensity to vote and at 5.2 pp for those with a low propensity. By ethnicity, the effect is 1.7 pp for white and 4.4 pp for Hispanic household members. The effect is also significantly larger for female household members than males, at 2.3 and 1.5 pp, respectively. The effect remains consistent at the baseline level when examined across local, county, and state-level demographic and political contexts.
This chapter examines how first-time voters respond socially and strategically to their peers’ political participation. I examine how ethnicities, political inclinations, and expectations about electoral outcomes influence peer effect dynamics. I leverage large-scale micro data for registered voters during the 2012 presidential election in Texas. To address endogeneity, I utilize peers’ voting eligibility as an instrumental variable for their actual turnout decisions. I construct school-based social networks by incorporating geographic information on students’ residences, public high schools, and school districts. Existing literature mainly focuses on positive social incentives. This study reaffirms the established findings of conformity within party affiliations. White Democrats’ likelihood of voting rises by 2.8pp for each additional white Democrat peer who votes. Voters who think they may be pivotal respond to peers differently. Voting of white Republicans
in moderately competitive Republican counties rises by 7.2pp for each additional white Democrat peer who votes. In contrast, this likelihood drops by 3.8pp in moderately competitive Democratic counties.
This chapter presents a two-stage ethical voter model for turnout, emphasizing the role of social incentives and how political parties harness it to generate high turnout and compete in an election. In the first (mobilization) stage, parties set up political rallies to attract voters with low voting costs to reveal themselves and commit to voting. In the second (coordination) stage, after observing commitments, the remaining citizens are endogenously motivated to turn out through the operation of social incentives. The social incentive functions as a multiplier of parties’ mobilization efforts; it also binds voters with similar voting costs and drastically mobilizes them in collective actions. In an election with a relatively high stake, political parties mix their strategies in a low-turnout range and induce a full turnout with a positive probability.