S050, CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA
Join Christian Grose, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Southern California for his talk:
“Strengthening Democracy with Dollars? Increasing Funding for Elections Changes Administrators’ Behavior and Increases Voter Turnout.”
This discussion is part of the American Politics Speaker Series sponsored by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for American Political Studies.
This will be an in-person event open to Harvard ID holders only. Lunch will be served.
Registration is required, please REGISTER HERE.
Talk abstract:
Does increasing spending on elections to open more polling places lead to higher voter turnout? Public officials who administer elections make decisions about the operation of elections, and these decisions are directly influenced by budgets available. However, scholars of elections have rarely examined the role of budgets on elite choices regarding making it easier (or harder) to vote. I theorize that administrative budgets provide for the ability for government officials to engage in discretionary activities to open more polling places, and this has a downstream effect of increasing turnout. A novel field experiment was conducted during the 2020 US general election in which local election officials were randomly encouraged to apply for nonpartisan philanthropic funding to open polling places; and a control group of local election officials were not. Results of the field experiment show that the randomized encouragement led to a 3.9%-point increase in local officials applying for and receiving the funding compared to control group officials. In a 2SLS causal model and in correlational analyses, there is evidence that exogenous increases to election budgets and exogenous increases in polling locations led to higher voter participation. The conclusions are that (1) some public officials can be encouraged to increase voter access via budgetary or financial nudges; and (2) increasing budgets on elections to open more polling locations increases voter participation.
For more information about this event, please visit the Ash Center website.