Collaborative Proposal: The Costs of Voting

人们投票的原因有很多，包括公民责任、自身利益和参与政治的愿望。但考虑到日常生活中的许多其他需求，投票很容易被雨天或强加给选民的其他成本所扰乱。投票的这些“成本”是什么？这些指标包括投票所花费的时间、选址、排队投票、往返投票站的路程，以及对选票选择的足够了解，从而将投票的信息降至最低。这个项目量化了投票成本，并提出了可能用于提高投票率的策略。它使用了不时发生的自然实验，即选举管理人员对一些投票站进行合并，以便选区更大，可投票的地方更少。加利福尼亚州最近在2003年和2005年举行了一连串的全州特别选举，导致了一些投票站的合并。就大多数实际目的而言，选择关闭哪些投票站还是开放哪些投票站的过程--也就是那些将在新投票站投票的选民与将在旧投票站投票的选民--是随机的。因此，通过观察投票点被合并的人和投票点没有被合并的人之间的行为差异，我们可以看到成本的增加对选民投票率的影响。半个世纪以来，政治学一直在努力解决选民投票率的悖论--为什么人们在一个非常基本的成本效益分析认为他们不应该投票的事实下仍然投票。这个项目将代表着在解决这一悖论方面的重大进步；它将通过比较导致不同成本的相似选民来准确衡量投票成本，并将确定投票行为可能发生变化的门槛。它还将确定不同类型的成本，并揭示哪种成本更麻烦。大多数民主国家的一个共同公共政策目标是将选民投票率最大化到可实现的最高水平，以便拥有尽可能代表公民的选民，从而增强民主进程的合法性。确定公民在选择是否投票时面临的成本，使政策制定者能够采取肯定的步骤，将这些成本降至最低，从而实现这一关键的政策目标。

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.