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.

 

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.