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。 但考虑到日常生活的许多其他需求，投票很容易因下雨天或强加给选民的其他成本而中断。 投票的“成本”是什么？ 他们包括一个人花的时间voitng，定位投票地点，排队等待投票，往返投票点和了解足够的选票选择，使一个人的投票最低限度地知情。 它使用自然实验，当一些投票站被选举管理人员合并时，会不时发生，这样选区就更大，投票地点就更少了。 最近在2003年和2005年在加州举行的一系列全州范围的特别选举产生了一些投票站合并。 选择关闭哪些投票站、开放哪些投票站的过程-也就是选择哪些选民将在新的投票站投票、哪些选民将在旧的投票站投票-在大多数实际情况下都是随机的。 因此，通过观察那些投票站被合并的人和那些投票站没有合并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站，并旅行更多的距离到达它-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--为什么人们在一个非常基本的成本效益分析表明他们不应该投票的情况下仍然投票。 该项目将代表解决这一悖论的重大进展;它将通过比较产生不同成本的类似选民来精确衡量投票成本，并将确定投票行为可能发生变化的阈值。 大多数民主国家的一个共同公共政策目标是最大限度地提高选民投票率，使其达到可达到的最高水平，从而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，使决策者能够采取积极步骤，尽量减少这些成本，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.