The elasticity of voter turnout: Investing 85 cents per voter to increase voter turnout by 4 percent

Highlights

• Assess the impact of a precise and very small change in voting cost on voter turnout.

• Paid postage (CHF 0.85) increases voter turnout by about 4 percent.

• Increase in voter turnout tends to reduce support for leftist positions.

• Voter turnout and ballot results are sensitive to small changes in ballot procedures.

Abstract

In the aftermath of elections or ballots, the legitimacy of the result is regularly debated if voter turnout was considered to be low. Hence, discussions about legal reforms to increase turnout are common in most democracies. We analyze the impact of a very small change in voting costs on voter turnout. Some municipalities in the Swiss Canton of Bern reduced voting costs by prepaying the postage of the return envelope (CHF 0.85). Prepaid postage is associated with a statistically significant 1.8 percentage points increase in voter turnout. Overall, this amounts to 4 percent more voters participating in the ballots. Moreover, we estimate the influence of this increase in turnout on party support in popular ballots. We find that social democrats and environmentalists see their relative support decline.

Introduction

The extent to which voters turn out is a recurring theme in the public debate before and after important elections and ballot decisions. For example, the recent presidential elections in the US and France or the close ballot result in the UK to leave the EU, known as Brexit, sparked lively discussions on voter turnout and how it relates to the legitimacy of an election or ballot result. Also the academic literature has focused on voter turnout and its implications for the workings of democracy. Famously, Lijphart (1997) argued that low voter turnout biases electoral influence in favor of the already better-off citizens.

In the last decades countless reforms to increase turnout, for example, by reducing the hurdles to participate in elections have been implemented in western democracies.¹ A very prominent example is the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the US, which removed hurdles that discriminated against minorities, even though, constitutionally, all citizens had the same fundamental political participation rights (e.g., Alt, 1994). Other examples are the introduction of postal voting, as for example in all elections and ballots in Switzerland or (partially) in the US, or (trial) projects to implement online voting systems, as for example in Estonia, the US, or Switzerland (e.g., Solop, 2001, Luechinger et al., 2007, Gronke et al., 2008, Alvarez et al., 2009, Funk, 2010, Gerber et al., 2013, Hodler et al., 2015, German and Serdült, 2017).

The differences in voting procedures across countries are vast. The US, for example, requires voters’ active registration before the actual act of voting. In Switzerland, in contrast, all Swiss citizens of the age of 18 and above automatically receive all the required materials to participate in elections and popular votes. Also the procedures on Election Day differ. While a growing part of the US population has access to postal voting in all-mail, absentee, and early voting procedures (with and without excuse), still a majority of voters in the US cast their vote on a specific day, at a specific location (Gronke et al., 2008, Giammo and Brox, 2010, Gerber et al., 2013). In contrast, all Swiss voters automatically have the option of postal voting. In this case, they fill out their voting materials – which they receive by postal mail at least 3 weeks prior to the ballot – and send it back to the election authority.

As there are vast differences in voting procedures across democracies, it comes as no surprise that there exists a vast academic literature exploring these differences. It analyzes how people vote and why they vote at all, given the well-known paradox of voting.² According to the Downsian model of electoral participation voter turnout decreases with voting costs (Downs, 1957, Tullock, 1967, Riker and Ordeshook, 1968; Aldrich, 1993, Fedderson and Sandroni, 2006). Voting costs are affected by many factors: information costs, time costs, travel costs, inconveniences such as burdensome voter registration procedures, queuing on ballot day, short or inconvenient opening hours, finding polling stations, social pressure, or the weather, etc. (E.g., Niemi, 1976, Fedderson and Pesendorfer, 1999, Highton, 1997, Highton, 2004; Knack, 1995, Blais, 2000, Haspel and Gibbs Knotts, 2005; Gomez et al., 2007, Gerber et al., 2008, Hansford and Gomez, 2010, Spencer and Markovits, 2010; Brady and McNulty, 2011, Fraga, 2011, Meier et al., 2016; Potrafke and Roesel, 2016). A rich literature searches for the institutional drivers of voter turnout, but there is still much debate on which factors have the most consistent impact and are the most important (e.g., Besley and Case, 2003, Blais, 2006, Geys, 2006, Hill, 2006, Smets and van Ham, 2013, Cancela and Geys, 2016). Often, however, studies have to rely on cross-country variation and the exploited institutional differences are not very sharp,³ or changes in voting cost are not precisely specified.

Our aim is to contribute to this literature and evaluate the impact of a very precise reduction of voting costs on voter turnout, while all else remains constant. We answer two simple yet important questions: Does a small change in the costs of voting affect voter turnout and, if yes, how does it affect party support in popular ballots?

While evidence on the influence of differences in voting procedures – for example, the introduction of postal voting – is not new, we assess the impact of the introduction of prepaid postage, which reduced voting costs by CHF 0.85 today (about USD 0.85), or the price of a stamp. Clearly, this change of voting costs is very precise from the perspective of public authorities. From the perspective of voters, however, prepaid postage might as well have other advantages affecting voting costs for individual citizens. For example, prepaid postage might also reduce transaction costs, and turnout is possible if stamps are not readily available at home and purchasing stamps at a postal office seems too burdensome. Hence, the costs of the policy are very well specified, while the actual cost reductions of voting might be higher from the perspective of actual voters.

We analyze the impact of prepaid postage on voter turnout in postal voting in Switzerland. In the Canton of Bern, some municipalities distribute prepaid return envelopes for voters who use the option of postal voting, while some municipalities do not prepay the postage. We use this simple and low-cost intervention to analyze the impact of prepaid postage on voter turnout in nationwide ballots. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the introduction of prepaid postage increases turnout by about 1.8 percentage points. Our data also permit us to estimate the impact of (continuous) changes in postage costs – due to increases in stamp prices, the introduction of prepaid postage, and inflation – on voter turnout. Estimating these effects provides a notion of the cost elasticity of voting. We find that a 1 Cent (CHF) increase in postage costs reduces voter turnout by 0.022–0.031 percentage points. Furthermore, we study the effect of the increase in voter turnout due to prepaid postage on the relative party support in popular ballots, something we refer to as “voter-party alignment”. We compare the municipal voting results in nation-wide ballots with the officially announced voting recommendation of the major parties. Based on these observations we construct a measure of voter-party alignment for each of the five major parties. We find that an increase in turnout negatively affects the alignment of voters with leftist party positions.

Closely related to our research question, Luechinger et al. (2007) find that the introduction of postal voting (per se) in Switzerland increased turnout by about 4.1 percentage points on average. Hodler, Luechinger and Stutzer (2015) document a turnout increase of about 5 percentage points and an altered composition of the active voting population. Postal voting reduced the average years of education as well as the average knowledge of the ballot propositions in the voting population. Bechtel and Schmid (2016) also find an increase in turnout of about 5 percentage points and differential effects on specific groups of voters depending on income, education and genuine interest in politics. Funk (2010) finds that the increase in turnout due to postal voting was modest in the aggregate and that especially small and close-knit communities even saw a negative effect on turnout. She attributes these results to a reduced incentive to vote, as the social control at the polling station disappeared with the introduction of postal voting.⁴