Polling place changes and political participation: evidence from North Carolina presidential elections, 2008–2016
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2021-10
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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>How do changes in Election Day polling place locations affect voter turnout? We study the behavior of more than 2 million eligible voters across three closely-contested presidential elections (2008–2016) in the swing state of North Carolina. Leveraging within-voter variation in polling place location change over time, we demonstrate that polling place changes reduce Election Day voting on average statewide. However, this effect is almost completely offset by substitution into early voting, suggesting that voters, on average, respond to a change in their polling place by choosing to vote early. While there is heterogeneity in these effects by the distance of the polling place change and the race of the affected voter, the fully offsetting substitution into early voting still obtains. We theorize this is because voters whose polling places change location receive notification mailers, offsetting search costs and priming them to think about the election before election day, driving early voting.</jats:p>
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Clinton, JD, N Eubank, A Fresh and ME Shepherd (2021). Polling place changes and political participation: evidence from North Carolina presidential elections, 2008–2016. Political Science Research and Methods, 9(4). pp. 800–817. 10.1017/psrm.2020.43 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/24309.
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Nicholas Eubank
I am an Associate Research Professor in the Duke Department of Political Science and Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), where I study a range of topics related to political accountability, including gerrymandering, social networks, election administration, and race and incarceration. My peer-reviewed work can be found in a range of journals, including APSR, Political Analysis, QJPS, PSRM, Election Law Journal, and Journal of Legal Analysis.
I am also the Director of the Duke Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science (MIDS) program, the current MIDS Director of Graduate Studies, and an Associate Director of the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke.
I am passionate about empowering students of all backgrounds to use data science tools to solve real-world problems. To that end, I teach two courses in the first-year MIDS curriculum. Practical Data Science (IDS 720), a flipped-classroom, exercise-focused course designed to give students practical experience wrangling and analyzing messy, real-world data using the tools of a professional data scientist. Causal Inference & Solving Real Problems with Data (IDS 701), a course that teaches methods for answering causal questions and transitioning from doing well-scaffolded classroom exercises to solving messy, real-world problems. I also teach a Computational Methods for Social Scientists bootcamp each year for incoming social science graduate students from Political Science and Sociology.
Adriane Stewart Fresh
I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. I received my PhD in Political Science at Stanford in 2017, and my MA in Economics at Stanford in 2015. Prior to arriving at Duke, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.
I study the political economy of development. My research concerns how elites respond to dramatic economic and institutional changes. I'm interested in the effects of these changes on elite persistence and the strategies that elites employ to contend with potential disruptions to their power. I study a diverse set of historical time periods and country contexts including the Industrial Revolution in Britain, regime change in Chile, and black enfranchisement in the US. I am interested in quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in causal inference in the context of observational research, as well as natural language processing using large corpuses of historical and historiographical text.
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