TY  - JOUR
AU  - Charles,Kerwin Kofi
AU  - Stephens,Melvin,Jr.
TI  - Employment, Wages and Voter Turnout
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17270
PY  - 2011
Y2  - August 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17270
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17270.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kerwin Kofi Charles
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773.834.8922
Fax: NA
E-Mail: kcharles@uchicago.edu

Melvin Stephens, Jr.
University of Michigan
Department of Economics
341 Lorch Hall
611 Tappan St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/647-5606
E-Mail: mstep@umich.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2011-10-01
AB  - This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous.  Using official county-level voting data and a variety of OLS and TSLS models, we find that increases in wages and employment: reduce voter turnout in gubernatorial elections by a significant amount; have no effect on Presidential turnout; and raise the share of persons voting in a Presidential election who do not vote on a House of Representative election on the same ballot.  We argue that this pattern (which contradicts some previous findings in the literature) can be fully accounted for by an information argument, and is either inconsistent with or not fully explicable by arguments based on citizens’ psychological motivations to vote in good or bad times; changes in logistical voting costs; or transitory migration.  Using individual-level panel data methods and multiple years’ data from the American National Election Study (ANES) we confirm that increases in employment lead to less use of the media and reduced political knowledge, and present associational individual evidence that corroborates our main argument.
ER  -