Voting Alone: The Effect of Early Voting on Turnout

• In Event: Interventions and Innovations That Impact Turnout and Voting

Abstract

Various modes of convenience voting, especially Early Voting (EV), are increasingly implemented and are being used by voters in democracies around the world. The idea behind these methods is to make the act of voting itself more convenient, thus lowering the cost of voting, and potentially getting more people to the polls (Gronke et al. 2008). We introduce a different perspective on convenience voting methods, taken from the literature that looks at voting as a social act.

There is a fair amount of evidence that voting is a social activity, and individual turnout research has pointed to the household as especially important (Dinas et al. 2019; Blais et al. 2019; Bhatti et al. 2020). People living together share political information and social norms, discuss politics more often, and even go to the polling station together (the so-called companion effect). Bergh, Christensen and Holmås (2023) show that the companion effect is strong in Norway; 60 percent (without home-based children) of those participating in the 2021-election voted in a polling station together with their partner. The companion effect is also far more common among immigrants and voters without higher education – groups with low overall turnout. For these voters, the act of voting could depend more on their family or social network, in which case voting is more of a social act and less of an individual act.

Is EV more of an individual act compared to Election Day voting? Thompson (2004:58) points out that EV “weakens the value of the experience of participating in a civic activity” and argue that “voting alone may even be worse than bowling alone”. Richey (2005), on the other hand, finds that voting by mail does not limit civic engagement and leads to more political discussion.

If voting does become more individualized, through increased the use Early voting, we ask if that have a detrimental effect on the propensity to vote in certain groups. If the partner votes prior to election day does that mobilize or demobilize the other partner to vote? We test these conflicting arguments based on a study population of couples taken from Norwegian public registers. Through detailed voter data on the entire Norwegian voting age population from the electoral roll, we identify voters who live together, and test if a partner’s use of early voting impact the remaining partner’s likelihood of voting. We find that low propensity voters are demobilized by a partner’s early vote, whereas the opposite is true for high propensity voters. The implication of these findings is that EV may not have an effect on overall turnout, but that it could cement and possibly increase social inequalities in voter turnout.

References
Bergh, J., og D.A. Christensen (2019). Sporadiske velgere eller permanente hjemmesittere? Om sosiale forskjeller i valgdeltakelse og velgermobilisering. I J. Bergh og B. Aardal (Eds.) Velgere og valgkamp. En studie av stortingsvalget 2017. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk.
Bhatti, Y., Fieldhouse, E., og Hansen, K. M. (2020). It’sa group thing: how voters go to the polls together. Political Behavior, 42(1), 1-34.
Blais, A. (2006). What affects voter turnout? Annual Review of Political Science. Palo Alto. 9, 111.
Dinas, E., Valentim, V., Broberg, N., og Franklin, M. N. (2019). Early Voting Experiences and Habit Formation. Available at SSRN 3466515.
Gronke, P., Galanes-Rosenbaum, E., og Miller, P. A. (2007). Early voting and turnout. PS: Political Science & Politics, 40(4), 639-645.
Richey, S. (2005). Who votes alone? The impact of voting by mail on political discussion. Australian Journal of Political Science, 40(3), 435-442.
Thompson, D. F. (2004). Election time: Normative implications of temporal properties of the electoral process in the United States. American Political Science Review, 98(1), 51-63.

Authors

• Johannes Bergh, Institute for social research

• Dag Arne Christensen, NORCE Society

• Henning Finseraas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology