A Note on Detecting Dividing Lines in Turnout: Spatial Dependence and Heterogeneity in the 2012 US Presidential Election

Nadia Fiorino, Nicola Pontarollo and Roberto Ricciuti

No 8167, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the dependent variable and splits the sample according to the non-linearity in the covariates. We find that in different groups of US counties, obtained through a spatial lag regression tree procedure, some variables have different statistical significance (or lack of it), and sometimes different signs. This heterogeneity – which is a manifestation of the complexity of the political behavior - is obfuscated by traditional methods that extrapolate a single average relationship between the variables.

Keywords: turnout; spatial dependence; heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C21 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8167.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8167

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().