Vote Overreporting While Black: Identifying the Mechanism Behind Black Survey Respondents’ Vote Overreporting

Abstract

It is now a well-documented fact of survey research that Black survey respondents overreport turning out to vote at higher rates than many of their peers of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. We bring renewed attention to this phenomenon by investigating how the ways in which the race of the interviewer might influence a Back respondent’s propensity to overreport turning out to vote. In this paper, we test two competing mechanisms for African American overreporting and race of interviewer effects: (1) racial group linked fate, and (2) conformity with norms of Black political behavior. We find support that social pressure to conform to group norms of political behavior is behind Black respondent’s overreporting in the presence of a same-race interviewer. These results have significant implications for how we view, analyze, and consider results from such studies.