How to Survey About Electoral Turnout? The Efficacy of the Face-Saving Response Items in 19 Different Contexts*

Alexandre Morin-Chassé, Damien Bol, Laura B. Stephenson and Simon Labbé St-Vincent

Political Science Research and Methods, 2017, vol. 5, issue 3, 575-584

Abstract: Researchers studying electoral participation often rely on post-election surveys. However, the reported turnout rate is usually much higher in survey samples than in reality. Survey methodology research has shown that offering abstainers the opportunity to use face-saving response options succeeds at reducing overreporting by a range of 4–8 percentage points. This finding rests on survey experiments conducted in the United States after national elections. We offer a test of the efficacy of the face-saving response items through a series of wording experiments embedded in 19 post-election surveys in Europe and Canada, at four different levels of government. With greater variation in contexts, our analyses reveal a distribution of effect sizes ranging from null to minus 18 percentage points.

Date: 2017
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