Suchergebnisse

It was a dark and stormy night in mid October in Boone, North Carolina. I was late for a gumbo dinner that my co-editor was hosting at his house in honor of a visit to the area by Barbara Walthall, the managing editor for PS. A radio program on the Ebola crisis in western Africa distracted my attention. The reporter was profiling a health-care worker who wanted to volunteer for service in the area, but her application had been delayed for weeks while she was shuttled back and forth between government and nongovernmental organizations, her application was processed and reprocessed, and even after she was approved, she was told that she could not be deployed for at least a month. The thrust of the story was clear: the listener was supposed to be outraged that bureaucratic incompetence and delay would only exacerbate what had already become the most severe international public health crisis in memory. Instead, my editorial antenna kicked in, and it struck me that political scientists might react very differently to this health-care worker's tale of woe. Recruiting, training, and deploying personnel to a rapidly changing crisis zone with severe infrastructure challenges and located thousands of miles away is a highly sophisticated dance. Yet completing this task in only four weeks struck me as quite impressive. I wondered if my colleagues would agree with me. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis paper estimates the effect of automatic voter registration (AVR) on voter turnout in California and Oregon. AVR systems register to vote all eligible individuals who transact with proscribed government agencies, most commonly the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMVs). The article isolates one part of the causal impact of AVR on turnout by taking advantage of a temporal feature of license renewals. Many individuals interact with the DMV periodically due to the need to renew drivers' licenses. Because licenses in both California and Oregon expire on birthdays, an individual's birth date can be treated as an exogenous variable discriminating between some individuals who are registered to vote in time for the election, while others are not. Our instrumental variable analysis compares registration and voting rates for individuals with birth dates prior and subsequent to the voter registration deadline. After calculating a causal effect of AVR on turnout at the individual level, we extrapolate this AVR "birthday" effect to overall voter turnout for these states.