Collaborative Proposal: The Costs of Voting

人们投票的原因有很多，包括公民责任、个人利益和参与政治的愿望。但是考虑到日常生活中的许多其他需求，投票很容易因雨天或强加给选民的其他费用而中断。投票的“成本”是什么？它们包括一个人花在投票上的时间，找到投票地点，排队投票，往返于投票站，以及充分了解选票选择，以使自己的投票最小化。这个项目量化了投票的成本，并提出了可能用于提高投票率的策略。它使用了自然实验，当一些投票站被选举管理人员合并时，有时会发生这种实验，这样选区就会更大，投票的地方就会更少。加州最近在2003年和2005年举行的一系列全州范围的特别选举导致了许多投票站的合并。选择哪些投票站关闭，哪些投票站开放——因此，那些将在新地点投票的选民和那些将在旧地点投票的选民——从大多数实际目的来看，是随机的。因此，通过观察投票点统一的人和投票点不统一的人之间的行为差异，我们可以看到成本的增加——必须找到一个新的投票点，并且要走更多的距离才能到达投票站——对选民投票率的影响。半个世纪以来，政治科学一直在努力解决选民投票率的悖论——为什么人们会投票，尽管最基本的成本效益分析认为他们不应该投票。这个项目将在解决这一悖论方面取得重大进展；它将通过比较相似的选民所产生的不同成本来精确地衡量投票成本，并将确定投票行为可能发生变化的阈值。它还将识别不同类型的成本，并揭示哪些更麻烦。在大多数民主国家，一个共同的公共政策目标是将选民投票率提高到可达到的最高水平，以便使选民尽可能地代表公民，从而增强民主进程的合法性。确定公民在选择是否投票时所面临的成本，使政策制定者能够采取积极措施，尽量减少这些成本，从而实现关键的政策目标。

People vote for many reasons, including civic duty, self-interest, and a desire to be involved in politics. But given the many other demands of daily life, voting can easily be disrupted by a rainy day or other costs imposed upon the voter. What are these "costs" of voting? They include the time one spends voitng, locating the voting place, waiting in line to vote, traveling to and from a polling place and learning enough about the ballot choices to make one's vote minimally informed.This project quantifies costs of voting and suggests strategies that might be used to increase turnout. It uses natural experiment that occur from time to time when some polling places are consolidated by election administrators so that precincts are larger and there are fewer places to vote. The recent spate of statewide special elections in 2003 and 2005 in California generated a number of polling place consolidations. The process of selecting which polling places to close versus which to leave open - and hence those voters who will vote at a new location versus those who will vote at their old one - is, for most practical purposes, random. Hence, by observing differences in behavior between people whose polling places are consolidated and people whose polling places are not, we can see what effect an increase in costs - having to find a new polling place, and traveling additional distance to reach it - has on voter turnout.For a half century, political science has grappled with the paradox of voter turnout - why people vote despite the fact that a very basic cost-benefit analysis says they shouldn't. This project will represent a significant advance in solving this paradox; it will precisely measure the costs of voting via comparison of similar voters incurring different costs, and will identify the thresholds at which voting behavior may change. It will also indentify different types of costs, and reveal which are more troublesome.A common public policy goal in most democracies is to maximize voter turnout to the highest achievable level, in order to have an electorate that is as representative of the citizenry as possible and thus enhance the legitimacy of the democratic process. Identifying the costs citizens face when choosing whether to vote or not permits policy makers to take affirmative steps to minimize those costs and thus achieve that critical policy goal.