Selective Turnout, Voting Policy, and Partisan Bias: Evidence from Multi-Level Data

Steven Berry (), Christian Cox and Philip Haile

No 34149, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study voting in general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. Our data set includes demographics and turnout of all registered voters for the years 2016–2020, as well as vote shares at the precinct and contest level. We estimate a Downsian voting model incorporating rich observed and unobserved heterogeneity at the voter and contest level. We find that voters with high perceived voting costs tend to favor Democrats, as do marginal voters in most districts. Variation in state voting policies accounts for a modest share of overall estimated voting costs but is sufficient to determine the majority party in some years. We also find that many states’ district maps favor one party in converting votes to seats. On net, these biases favor Republicans. For example, we estimate that winning 50% of votes in every state would give Republicans a nine percentage point seat advantage in the House.

JEL-codes: H10 L0 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: IO PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34149.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:34149

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34149
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().