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Estimating Voter Registration Deadline Effects with Web Search Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Alex Street ,
Thomas A. Murray ,
John Blitzer  and
Rajan S. Patel
Alex Street*
Affiliation:
Political Science, Carroll College, Helena, MT 59625
Thomas A. Murray
Affiliation:
Department of Biostatistics, MD Anderson Cancer Center, e-mail: tamurray@mdanderson.org
John Blitzer
Affiliation:
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, e-mail: blitzer@google.com
Rajan S. Patel
Affiliation:
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, e-mail: rajan@google.com
*
e-mail: street.alex@gmail.com (corresponding author)
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Abstract

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Electoral rules have the potential to affect the size and composition of the voting public. Yet scholars disagree over whether requiring voters to register well in advance of Election Day reduces turnout. We present a new approach, using web searches for “voter registration” to measure interest in registering, both before and after registration deadlines for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Many Americans sought information on “voter registration” even after the deadline in their state had passed. Combining web search data with evidence on the timing of registration for 80 million Americans, we model the relationship between search and registration. Extrapolating this relationship to the post-deadline period, we estimate that an additional 3–4 million Americans would have registered in time to vote, if deadlines had been extended to Election Day. We test our approach by predicting out of sample and with historical data. Web search data provide new opportunities to measure and study information-seeking behavior.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Spring 2015 , pp. 225 - 241
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open-Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

Footnotes

Authors' note: The authors thank Mike Alvarez and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, and Joshua Dyck, Peter Enns, Matt Filner, Alex Kuo, Renee Liu, Philipp Rehm, Steve Scott, Daniel Smith, Nigel Snoad, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Hal Varian and seminar participants at Cornell University and Google for helpful suggestions. Replication data are available in Street et al. (2015). Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis web site.

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