For my degree in Public Policy, I researched the question of making Election Day a day off to determine if voter participation would improve. I gathered information from around the world and examined the differences between elections held on week days with elections held on weekends. One surprise from the study was how many elections are held on Sunday. The other surprise is that voter participation is higher if elections are held on a weekday or work day.
Abstract
This paper examines whether voting on weekends would
increase voter turnout. The study controls for several of the most popular
socio-economic and institutional factors that have been hypothesized by earlier
research as influencing voter turnout. This study concludes that voting on the
weekends would not improve voter turnout, and also yields new conclusions
regarding the consequences of choosing to study turnout as a percent of
registered voters versus studying turnout as a percent of the entire voting age
population. A post analysis of the data further reveals that the primary factor
in the differentiation of results in voter turnout data is due to the different
types of registered voter populations -- voluntary verses required. When these
two populations are mixed, they yield conflicting results between registered
and voting age population turnout, but when separated, results become more
homogenous. The full thesis can be downloaded in three PDF files. Three files are required due to the arrangement of tables in the paper. |
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