| dc.description.abstract | The United States has a low turnout rate compared to many of its peer nations; one potential explanation is high voting "costs" or barriers to political participation. Many state lawmakers have attempted to lower these costs by introducing methods of convenience voting, any form of voting which does not take place in one's polling place on Election Day. I study the effects of such methods in the first two chapters of this dissertation. In my first chapter, I study a tradeoff introduced by convenience voting: early voters forfeit the ability to respond to late-election information. I show this information can matter for election outcomes using a difference-in-differences design and variation in the availability of early voting in the 2016 presidential election. I then develop a model in which voters choose whether to vote early, late, or not at all, and where both information and the realized costs of Election Day voting affect whether a particular voter votes or not, and detail the conditions under which early voting is beneficial to social welfare. In my second chapter, I show that universal vote by mail, a system in which ballots are mailed to all registered voters, only moderately increases turnout, but that turnout effects are pronounced for counties with many rural and older voters. I also find that the turnout effect is increasing in a county's "registration rate," the number of registered voters divided by the voting-age population. Given that voting costs differ across voters in a non-random way, elected officials may not always be representative of the desires of the public, and some citizens may have no route to influencing politicians via the ballot box. This leads to my third chapter, which asks how and why politicians provide public goods to citizens who have no power to "punish" them with their vote. We look at the provision of Black public schooling in the post-Reconstruction South, where Black citizens were politically disenfranchised, and find some support of the theory that Black families punished local governments by "voting with their feet" instead. | |
