Candis Smith, Thesis Supervisor Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
social mobility voter turnout context contextual effects contextual studies
Abstract:
Recent literature on voter turnout has demonstrated the complicated pathways through which social context influences peoples’ decision to vote. This analysis expands the explanatory scope of these studies by exploring how social mobility—the probability that children will be economically better off than their parents—influences voter turnout across Pennsylvania. With a dataset composed of voter lists for every county in Pennsylvania, this analysis employs a multilevel model (HLM) to estimate the independent and joint effects of individual-level demographic and county-level economic factors on voter turnout for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections. This analysis reveals that social mobility reduces voter turnout at the county level, but that the effect manifests differently among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. While higher levels of social mobility reduce disparities in voter turnout among partisans, it exacerbates disparities in turnout between partisans and Independents.
