Suchergebnisse

Research on voter participation has led to the conventional wisdom that registered people will vote and that registration requirements inhibit voter turnout. However, research on which this belief is based improperly tests registered people who have no registration needs, and thus, it does not accurately identify the contextual influences associated with the registration decision. Contrary to past research, this analysis of January unregistered individuals from the 1980 ANES panel study suggests longer registration-closing periods increase the likelihood of November registration. An expectation of voting and uncertainty about the future may explain the phenomenon. Also, this analysis finds that registration requirements do not appear to inhibit registration for election-year movers.

Previous judicial decision-making studies have used party labels as surrogates for ideological orientation. In this study of state-level reapportionment cases before the U.S. district courts, I investigate the partisan reference-group identification of judges as a nonlegal influence on decisions. The partisan identification of judges is juxtaposed with the political orientations of the legislatures passing reapportionment plans. The results suggest that partisan effects are included in the pattern of decisions in cases related to the state-level district plans. While judges tend to vote against plans submitted to them from legislatures where one political party has numerical control of the reapportionment process, they vote against plans presented from legislatures of their own party at a much lower rate than in cases where the party opposite their own controls the district drawing process. The logit model correctly predicts 89.3% of the cases and produces a 60.3% reduction of error.