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Ballot Initiative Knowledge and Voter Turnout

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Ballot Initiative Knowledge and Voter Turnout Ballot Initiative Knowledge and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Field Experiments and National Surveys Jason Barabas1 Charles Barrilleaux2 Daniel Scheller3 DRAFT Abstract Policy issues play an important role in explanations of vote choice, but their effect on political participation is less clear. We employ randomized field experiments to determine whether reminding voters about the presence of issue amendments on the ballot influenced turnout in Florida during the 2006 general election. Contrary to findings in some observational studies, providing information regarding initiatives failed to stimulate turnout on all but the least publicly salient ballot amendments placed before voters in that election. In particular, a mail postcard message reminding citizens to vote on ballot measures that had largely escaped media scrutiny increased turnout by a few percentage points. Traditional get-out-the-vote civic duty messages proved to be ineffective as were attempts to remind citizens to vote on several more well-known initiatives. In an attempt to replicate the patterns nationally, we documented strong associations between knowledge of ballot initiatives and intended turnout in two cross-sectional surveys from 2006. Taken together, the empirical results suggest that increasing awareness of ballot initiatives can stimulate voter turnout, especially on relatively obscure issue amendments. 1 Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, jason.barabas @ stonybrook.edu. 2 LeRoy Collins Professor, Department of Political Science, Florida State University, cbarrilleaux @ fsu.edu. 3 Assistant Professor, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas-El Paso, dsscheller @ utep.edu. Issues play an important role in elections, but scholars usually focus on the degree to which voters use policy preferences to select one candidate over another. Yet in many electoral settings citizens vote directly on issue initiatives in addition to selecting candidates. We have theories of issue voting (e.g., Carmines and Stimson 1980; Nie, Verba, and Petrocik 1979; Rabinowitz and Macdonald 1989), but surprisingly no comparable concept of “issue turnout” has emerged. The closest one comes to a theory of issue-based turnout is the rational choice explanation of voting (Downs 1957) in which an individual’s decision to vote depends on the probability of affecting the election times the utility gained from having the most preferred candidate win minus any costs. Smith (2001) adopts this perspective in his study of how salient ballot measures stimulate turnout. Information-based explanations of turnout also underlie work by Tolbert and her colleagues (Tolbert, Grummel, and Smith 2001; Tolbert, McNeal, and Smith 2003) as well as other studies that employ formal theoretical perspectives (Grosser and Schram 2006; Lassen 2005). The idea that issues, and ballot initiatives in particular, can help reverse years of declining voter turnout has great normative appeal (Teixeira 1992). Activists and progressive reformers claim that direct democracy can help create engaged citizens (Schmidt 1989; Zimmerman 1999). Scholars are also enamored with the notion of participatory democracy (Barber 1985; Pateman 1976). We take up the question of whether providing information about the presence of ballot initiatives affects voter participation. We examine this question using a methodology—the field experiment—which is the gold standard of get-out-the-vote evaluations (e.g., Gerber and Green 2000a; 2000b; 2001; 2002; Green, Gerber, and Nickerson 2003; Nickerson 2006). To date field experiments have not been used in a large scale study of the effects of get out the vote efforts on voting in elections with 2 ballot initiatives. Our results suggest that providing information on ballot amendments can stimulate turnout, but mostly in situations when the initiatives are relatively obscure. The Effects of Ballot Initiatives on Voter Turnout Ballot propositions have become a popular way for citizens to influence the laws and policies of their state. Twenty-four states in America practice some form of direct democracy and usage is on the rise. For instance, David Magleby (1994) found that from 1898 to 1992 over 1,700 initiatives were placed before U.S. voters. That number would have been higher had hundreds more qualified for inclusion on the ballots. However, Magleby notes that only 38% of initiatives passed (p. 231), which suggests that voters are fairly discerning. Furthermore, some states like Oregon and California offer voters many initiatives in elections while others like Illinois use it sparingly and only for the purpose of altering the legislative process (Tolbert, Lowenstein, and Donovan 1998). Past research has often concentrated on how initiatives are placed on the ballot, the role of special interests, and the effects on public policy outcomes or enfranchisement (e.g., Boehmke 2002; Bowler, Donovan, and Tolbert 1998; Gerber 1999; Smith 2004). However, two rationales are typically advanced for the use of ballot initiatives: (1) preventing the legislature from becoming unrepresentative, and (2) educating the voters on issues and civic skills like voting. While there is an active literature on the first question (e.g., Gerber 1996; Matsusaka 1995), it is “educative” effects of initiatives that are of concern here (Tolbert and Smith 2005). Most of the early studies that ask whether the presence of ballot initiatives increases turnout were not encouraging. In particular, work in the 1980s found no statistically significant relationship 3 between direct democracy and electoral participation (Everson 1981; Gilliam 1985; Magelby 1984). However, by the early-2000s evidence started to accumulate to suggest that ballot initiatives increase turnout, particularly in midterm elections (Smith 2001), but also in presidential contests. For example, using a pooled times of data for the 50 states over a 26-year period (from 1970 to 1996), Tolbert, Grummel, and Smith (2001) find that the presence and usage of citizen inspired initiatives boosts voter turnout from 3 to 4.5% in presidential races and from 7 to 9% in midterm elections. More recent work by Tolbert and Smith (2005) estimated the effects at nearly 1 to 2 percentage points for presidential and midterm elections respectively. They also document variation in effects within types of elections, observing a 4 point turnout effect in 1992 but a smaller 0.5 percentage point effect in 1996 (Smith and Tolbert 2004, 51). Methodological Advances and Limitations Three types of methodological improvements helped move the field from the null findings of years ago (Everson 1981) to the largely positive effects of today (Tolbert et al. 2001; 2003; 2005; Smith 2001). First, scholars like Tolbert, Grummel, and Smith (2001) obtained more precise statistical estimates by controlling for potentially confounding factors such as race, income, and the distinctiveness of the South. Also, they did so while using panel-corrected standard errors to acknowledge correlations across the repeated state-level observations. Finally, and most recently, they refined their analyses to consider distinctions between the voter-age versus voter-eligible populations (Tolbert and Smith 2005). However, these studies use aggregate-level data. A second methodological innovation has been to employ individual-level data. For example, “To avoid the ecological fallacies to which 4 aggregate-level analyses are prone…,” Tolbert, McNeal, and Smith (2003, 27) use individual level American National Election Studies (ANES) data collected during 1996, 1998, and 2000 to show that ballot initiatives increase turnout in midterm elections, but not necessarily during the presidential years. Lacey (2005) obtained similar results using a slightly different set of ANES surveys in 1990, 1992, 1994 and 1996. Finally, an important methodological advance with theoretical relevance concerns the salience of the initiative. Mark Smith (2001) finds that ballot initiatives increase turnout in midterm elections to the degree that they are salient. In other words, Smith argues turnout should be and indeed was found to be highest when a state’s largest newspaper devoted a lot of front page coverage to particular amendments on the day after the election (also see Lacey 2005). However, Tolbert and her colleagues (Tolbert, Grummel, and Smith. 2001) question the validity of Smith’s measure. They note that “A more direct and simple measure of saliency is the actual number of initiatives on the ballot each election…” (p. 632). That is, instead of a simple dichotomous measure of whether a state employs the initiative process, they use the number of initiatives on the ballot at any given moment as a way of capturing the amount of information available regarding ballot initiatives (also see Tolbert, McNeal, and Smith 2003; Tolbert and Smith 2005). Yet no matter what measure of salience one adopts—front-page media stories, initiative counts, or otherwise—room for improvements remains even with these advances. In particular, there is a tremendous amount of heterogeneity in ballot initiatives rules across the states. Some require the signatures of 10% of the total votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election (e.g., Utah) while for others the bar is 5% (Nebraska, Montana), 4% (Arkansas), or just one signature from voters residing in at least two-thirds of a state’s election districts (Alaska). The states also 5 use different time requirements—Idaho, Oregon, and Utah do not limit the amount of
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