Do voters
turn out more or less frequently when surrounded by those like them?
While decades of research examined the determinants of turnout,
little is known about how the turnout of one voter is influenced by
the characteristics of other voters around them. We geocode over 50
million voter registration records in California, Florida, and North
Carolina and estimate the effects of racial and partisan composition
of small residential neighborhoods at the census block level.
Through cross-section and panel difference-in-differences
estimation, we address the general identification problem of
neighborhood research: voters in different neighborhoods cannot be
directly compared because both voters' individual characteristics
and those of their neighborhoods differ. We find that a 10
percentage point increase in the out-group neighborhood proportion
yields an approximately 0.5 to 2.5 percentage point decrease in the
turnout probability. These neighborhood effects persist in
non-competitive districts, suggesting that mobilization alone cannot
explain their existence. (Last Revised, January
2014) |