The effect of California’s top-two primary system on voter turnout in US House Elections

Daniel D. Bonneau () and John Zaleski ()
Additional contact information
Daniel D. Bonneau: West Virginia University
John Zaleski: University of Chicago

Economics of Governance, 2021, vol. 22, issue 1, No 1, 21 pages

Abstract: Abstract This paper evaluates one potential impact of California’s Proposition 14, which created a top-two primary system for all non-Presidential election races within the state. Our analysis is twofold, with the concern of each analysis placed on voter roll off when the result of the top-two primary placed a non-traditional pairing of candidates on the ballot.We focus on U.S. House races using data at the congressional district level to evaluate the impact of a non-traditional general election that omits one of the major parties from the ballot. Using major party registration of the political party omitted from the general election ballot, we find suggestive evidence that voter roll-off increases with these non-traditional contests. These elections do not effect voter turnout as a whole, but can increase voter roll-off by upwards of 7%.

Keywords: Voter roll off; Top-two primary; Voter turnout; Legislative election; Proposition 14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10101-021-00249-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:ecogov:v:22:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10101-021-00249-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10101-021-00249-8

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger

More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().