Working Paper: NBER ID: w17270
Authors: Kerwin Kofi Charles; Melvin Stephens Jr.
Abstract: This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety of OLS and TSLS models, we find that increases in wages and employment: reduce voter turnout in gubernatorial elections by a significant amount; have no effect on Presidential turnout; and raise the share of persons voting in a Presidential election who do not vote on a House of Representative election on the same ballot. We argue that this pattern (which contradicts some previous findings in the literature) can be fully accounted for by an information argument, and is either inconsistent with or not fully explicable by arguments based on citizens' psychological motivations to vote in good or bad times; changes in logistical voting costs; or transitory migration. Using individual-level panel data methods and multiple years' data from the American National Election Study (ANES) we confirm that increases in employment lead to less use of the media and reduced political knowledge, and present associational individual evidence that corroborates our main argument.
Keywords: voter turnout; labor market activity; political information
JEL Codes: D72; D80; J22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| increased labor market activity (J68) | lower voter turnout (K16) |
| increased labor market activity (J68) | no significant effect on presidential voter turnout (K16) |
| increased labor market activity (J68) | decreased leisure time (J22) |
| decreased leisure time (J22) | reduced political information exposure (D72) |
| reduced political information exposure (D72) | lower voter turnout (K16) |
| increased labor market activity (J68) | reduced political information exposure (D72) |
| increased labor market activity (J68) | increased rolloff (E11) |
| increased rolloff (E11) | decreased voter turnout (K16) |