Voter Turnout Among the American States: Systemic and Individual Components

Abstract

Traditional studies of voter turnout in the United States have identified three factors which are presumed to explain most of the differences between the states in voter turnout: socio-demographic differences, electoral competitiveness, and differences in the rules under which elections are conducted. These studies have not, however, clearly distinguished the three factors largely because of their exclusive reliance on aggregate data to analyze the differences. The purpose of this paper is to 1) distinguish between individual and systemic components of turnout and 2) to attempt to partition the variation in turnout between the components. Unlike previous research, this study used both survey and aggregate data to decompose the variation in turnout among the states into first two components—individual and systemic, and then the latter into political (electoral competitiveness) and legal.