The Risk of Narrow, Disputable Results in the U.S. Electoral College: 1836-2020

Michael Geruso and Dean Spears

No 27993, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Close elections are important for many reasons, including that consequent election disputes can weaken democratic legitimacy and risk political violence. We quantify the probability of close outcomes in US presidential races with novel applications of empirical election models from several sources. We show that razor-thin margins are very likely under the Electoral College (EC). And we establish that the EC causes this closeness: It would not occur under any plausibly comparable popular vote system. The tendency of the EC to generate close elections is true today and throughout US presidential voting history.

JEL-codes: H8 J1 J18 K16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: LE PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27993.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:nbr:nberwo:27993

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27993

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().