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Political Analysis Political Analysis

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On the Overreport Bias of the National Election Study Turnout Rate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Michael P. McDonald
Michael P. McDonald*
Affiliation:
Department of Public and International Affairs, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive — 3F4, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444. e-mail: mmcdon@gmu.edu
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Abstract

Consumers of the National Election Study (NES) should be concerned if the survey has a bias that is increasing with time. A recent article by Barry Burden claims that for presidential elections, there is an increasing overreport bias, or turnout gap, between the NES turnout rate and the observed turnout rate caused by declining NES response rates. I show that the increasing turnout gap is an artifact of the universes these two turnout rates are based on. Reconciling the two universes shows no systematic increase of the reconciled turnout gap in presidential elections from 1948 to 2000, and furthermore demonstrates that the post-1976 rise in NES response rates (until 2000) is rewarded in a lower turnout gap. In addition, I offer another theory to explain the turnout gap. If respondents have an equal propensity to misreport that they voted when they did not, as turnout declines, the number of nonvoter respondents increases and so does the turnout gap. I show that in multivariate analysis this theory outperforms Burden's response rate driven theory, though neither theory reaches statistical significance.

Type
Replications and Extensions
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Spring 2003 , pp. 180 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association 2003 

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References

Burden, Barry C. 1999. “Voter Turnout and the National Election Studies.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association Meeting, Boston, MA.Google Scholar
Burden, Barry C. 2000. “Voter Turnout and the National Election Studies.” Political Analysis 8:389–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Day, Jennifer C. 1998. “Projections of the Voting-Age Population for States: November 1998.” Current Population Reports, P25-1132. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census.Google Scholar
McDonald, Michael P., and Popkin, Samuel. 2001. “The Myth of the Vanishing Voter.” American Political Science Review 95:963–974.Google Scholar
Miller, Warren E., and the National Election Studies. 1999. American National Election Studies Cumulative Data File, 1948-1998 [Computer file], 10th ICPSR version. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan [producer], and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].Google Scholar
Sapiro, Virginia, Rosenstone, Steven J., and the National Election Studies. 2002. American National Election Cumulative Data File, 1948-2000 [Computer file], 11th ICPSR version. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan [producer], and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor].Google Scholar
Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Rosenstone, Stephen J. 1980. Who Votes? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
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