Written evidence submitted by Susan Banducci, Professor of Politics, and Daniel Stevens, Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Exeter (VUK 120)
Executive Summary
This evidence focuses on the Inquiry’s questions about what can be learned from other countries, the promise of electoral reform, and the ways in which new technology could be used to enhance engagement and turnout.
Our research on the US shows that reforms intended to make voting more convenient, such as making registration easier, tend to exacerbate the socio-economic bias in turnout.
Other comparative research points to the positive benefits of making elections more competitive and visible in the media on turnout.
Based on this research, we offer three recommendations: that reforms designed to make voting easier still need to be accompanied by ways of motivating voters; direct funding of parties and more free media time to enhance the competitiveness, salience and visibility of elections; greater efforts to use social pressure, including via new technology, to enhance people’s motivation to vote.
Introduction
1. We are responding to the Committee’s call for written evidence as experts in the fields of voting, registration, and media. We have conducted research on these topics in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and New Zealand.
2. We address three questions in the terms of reference:
What lessons can be learnt from other countries where voter registration and turnout is higher?
To what extent could electoral reform, rebuilding political parties or changes to party funding improve public engagement and voter turnout?
In what ways could new technologies be used to encourage people to vote?
3. In the evidence below we focus on how proposed reforms or new technologies would influence the socio-economic inequalities in turnout (i.e. that those with greater socio-economic resources are more likely to vote than those without creating an imbalance in the electorate). In general, low voter turnout is problematic because there is a “systematic bias against less well to do citizens” and “unequal participation spells unequal influence” (Lijphart 1997: 1). Indeed, recent evidence suggests that reforms intended to make voting easier actually increase bias in the electorate because the better off are more likely to take advantage of the reforms (Banducci and Karp 1998) whereas reforms such as moving to proportional representation (e.g. New Zealand) increase turnout amongst marginalised groups (Karp and Banducci 1999). Therefore, any reforms undertaken must balance the increase in turnout against the effects on the socio-demographic bias in the electorate.
4. Reforms implemented in the US have focused on decreasing the costs of voting, thus not on enhancing the engagement of voters per se but on making voting easier for people who might otherwise be indifferent. Reforms have included: relaxing the burden of registration (e.g., the National Voter Registration Act), enhancing the possibilities for absentee voting, permitting the casting of provisional ballots (the Help America Vote Act), allowing for in-person early voting by opening some polling places before “election day,” and vote-by-mail (VBM) elections.
5. Prior expectations about these reforms were great. Before the passage of the National Voter Registration Act, the conventional wisdom was that many of the problems of participation in American elections could be attributed to the burden of registration; if registration was made easier, it was argued, turnout would increase dramatically because registered members of the electorate vote in large numbers. These expectations were overblown. Although more people registered to vote and as many as 1 in 3 voters in the states that allow voting early cast their votes before “election day,” the reforms appear to have affected turnout only at the margins. Moreover, whether it was Motor Voter legislation, postal balloting ( Karp and Banducci 2000), or absentee and early voting (Banducci and Karp 1998), research found at best only modest effects in bringing more resource-poor (Banducci and Karp 1998; Stevens and Transue 2008) citizens to the polls. The convenience of postal balloting, for example, appears to be appreciated most by the resource-rich in the United States (Karp and Banducci 2000). It is also noteworthy that a more liberal approach to postal balloting has had an underwhelming impact on turnout in Britain (Curtice 2005). In sum, simply making voting easier does not appear to dramatically increase turnout, nor does it decrease inequalities in the composition of the voting electorate.
The above leads to our first recommendation: Investment in reforms that make voting more convenient need to be undertaken at the same time as reforms that mobilise voters.
6. Increased funding to parties and increased free air time will make elections more competitive, increasing the interest in the campaign and perceived benefits of voting. There is a connection between the quantity and quality of coverage of politics and elections and low voter engagement and turnout. The empirical evidence shows that citizens who have been exposed to an election campaign through the media have a higher probability of voting than those who did not see much of the campaign coverage (see, e.g., Banducci and Semetko 2003; Banducci, de Vreese and Schoonvelde 2014). Public direct funding and free air time also are predicted to increase turnout by over 10 percentage points (Baek 2009, Table1). Evidence from European Parliamentary elections shows that increased media coverage of the election reduces socio-economic inequalities in the electorate (Banducci 2012).
7. Increasing free access will lead to greater coverage of campaigns in the media. Direct funding to parties will allow them to invest resources in engaging voters directly as modern, less frequent, and more impersonal methods of mobilization that are a function of technology are less effective means of mobilising voters (Karp, Banducci and Bowler 2008).
The above leads to our second recommendation: Increase salience of campaigns and elections by increasing direct funding to parties and allowing more free air time
8. Social pressure is a particularly powerful motivator. Research in the United States shows that messages that decry the fact that large numbers of one’s fellow citizens do not bother to vote are less effective than messages that remind people that it is the norm to vote, i.e., that one is unusual in not voting, or that suggest other people could find out that one did not vote. Although the “purple revolution” in Iraq was about avoiding voter fraud, it also served as a sign that one had voted. In other elections, stickers saying “I voted” are handed out. This kind of social pressure “nudge” could be tried in the UK.
9. Social pressure via new media and technologies should also be explored. A large field experiment on 61 million voters during the 2010 midterm elections in the US showed that a Facebook message that people in one’s network had voted (and encouraging others to vote) had substantial impact on turnout but that a Facebook message that simply provided information about the election had no impact (Bond et al. 2012). Supporting a social media campaign encouraging people to “let your friends know you have voted” could be done via Facebook and other social media with the result that many are “nudged” into voting.
The above leads to our final recommendation: Implement a social media campaign encouraging people to vote
27 June 2014
Baek, Mijeong. 2009. “A Comparative Analysis of Political Communication Systems and Voter Turnout.” American Journal of Political Science 53: 376-393.
Banducci, Susan. 2012. “Political Inequality in Second Order Elections: Resources, Campaign Mobilization and Voter Turnout.” Paper presented at the Conference to Mark Richard Sinnott’s Retirement, University College, Dublin. May 31 – June 1.
Banducci, Susan, Claes de Vreese and Martijn Schoonvelde 2014. “The Information Environment and Participation: When Reading a Newspaper Increases the Probability of Voting.” Paper presented at Midwest Political Science Association Meeting, Chicago, IL, April 16-19.
Banducci, Susan, and Jeffrey Karp. 1998. "Representation under a Proportional System." In Voters’ Victory: New Zealand’s First Election Under Proportional Representation. Auckland: Auckland University Press. Pp. 135-52.
Banducci, Susan, and Holli Semetko. 2003. “Media and Mobilization in the 1999 European Parliamentary Election.” In Europe, Parliament and the Media. Martyn Bond, ed. Federal Trust: London. 189-204.
Bond, Robert, Christopher Fariss, Jason Jones, Adam Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime Settle, and James Fowler. 2012. “A 61-million-person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization.” Nature 489: 295-298.
Curtice, John. 2005. "Turnout: Electors Stay Home—Again." Parliamentary Affairs 58: 776-785.
Karp, Jeffrey, and Susan Banducci. 1999. “The Impact of Proportional Representation on Turnout: Evidence from New Zealand.” Australian Journal of Political Science 34: 363-377.
Karp, Jeffrey, and Susan Banducci. 2000. Going Postal: How All-Mail Elections Influence Turnout. Political Behavior 22: 223-39.
Karp, Jeffrey, Susan Banducci and Shaun Bowler. 2008. "Getting Out the Vote: Party Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective." British Journal of Political Science 38: 91-112.
Lijphart, Arend. 1997. “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma.” American Political Science Review 91:1-14.
Stevens, Daniel, and John Transue. 2008. “Registration and Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, 1972-2004.” Paper presented at American Political Science Association Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 30-September 2.