Title:      Registration and Voting under Rational Expectations

Authors:    Christopher Achen

Entrydate:  2008-07-07 01:08:24

Keywords:   turnout, registration, Heckman, Dubin-Rivers,
expectations

Abstract:   Alone among modern democracies, the United States
makes voter registration a personal responsibility rather than a
governmental function.  In almost all states, registration
deadlines occur well before elections.  Failure to register by
the deadline makes the probability of voting exactly zero.  This
sequential feature of the registration and voting decisions has
been skipped over by most researchers, who simply ignore
registration.  Others, notably Timpone (1998), have used the
seemingly appropriate Heckman-style selection model, but have
arrived at findings difficult to believe.  This paper
investigates the appropriate choice of a registration model
under a rational expectations assumption about the desire to
vote, showing that, rather surprisingly, conventional selection
models will generally perform less well than ignoring the
selection effect of registration entirely.  However, neither is
quite correct.  Finally then, the paper proposes and tests a
flexible model for registration as a step toward substantively
appropriate joint modeling of registration and voting.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=787

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