Dear all,
This week at the Applied Statistics Workshop we will be welcoming Stephen Pettigrew, a
Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University. He will be presenting work entitled "The
Downstream Consequences of Long Waits: How Lines at the Precinct Depress Future
Turnout." Please find the abstract below and on the website. The paper is
attached.
We will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 at noon and lunch will be provided. See you all
there!
Best,
Pam
Title: "The Downstream Consequences of Long Waits: How Lines at the Precinct Depress
Future Turnout"
Abstract: Political scientists have increasingly emphasized the role played by an
individual's identity and life experiences in their patterns of political
participation. In this paper, I explore how one particular type of experience-standing in
line at a precinct to vote-shapes the turnout behavior of voters in future election. I
demonstrate that for every additional hour a voter waits in line to vote, their
probability of voting in the subsequent election drops by 1 percentage point. As a result,
nearly 200,000 people did not vote in November 2014 because waiting in a long line in 2012
turned them off from the process. To arrive at these estimates, I analyze vote history
files using a combination of exact matching and placebo tests to test the identification
assumptions. I then leverage an unusual institutional arrangement in the City of Boston
and longitudinal data from Florida to show that the result also holds at the precinct
level. The findings in this paper have implications for our understanding of what
motivates or demotivates a person from voting. They also suggest that racial asymmetries
in precinct wait times are contributing to under-representation of racial minorities in
the voter pool.
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