Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Democracy is seen as a cornerstone of development and elections are one of the means by which the democratic process moves forward. Yet voter turnout has always been short of optimal across both developed and developing countries. There are various theories that try to explain this lack of participation. Some of the factors that are often considered are cost of voting and lack of motivation arising from the notion that one’s individual vote doesn't count. The Rational Choice Theory of voting emphasizes that people are only likely to vote if they feel like their vote is going to determine electoral outcomes. On the other hand, there are some like Riker and Ordeshook who believe that voters find an intrinsic value or utility in the act of voting and are likely to vote anyways even if their individual vote is not the deciding one. This paper takes a stance that lies somewhere in the middle of these two theories and asserts that people are more likely to vote when they feel that they have enough candidates to choose from. This has important policy implications as it implies that something as simple as more choice in terms of candidates could potentially strengthen the democratic process through an increase in voter turnout.

For this purpose, the paper uses a panel dataset with election information for the US House Representative elections for the years 2008, 2012 and 2016. The data is aggregated at the congressional district level. The paper tries to isolate the impact of candidate counts on voter turnout after controlling for factors like closeness of elections and campaign expenditure. Closeness of elections can be defined in terms of how competitive the candidates are compared to each other. The closer the odds are for two or more candidates to win the higher the turnout rate is expected to be. Another factor that is thought to impact voter turnout is campaign expenditure. One would expect that as campaign expenditures increase, people are more likely to show up and vote. After controlling for both these factors this paper looks at the impact of the number of candidates on voter turnout. It also tries to isolate the nature of this relationship. It finds a positive linear relationship between number of candidates that contest elections and voter turnout implying that citizens value choice.