Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T20:07:03.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Politically Invisible in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2021

Simon Jackman  and
Bradley Spahn Open the ORCID record for Bradley Spahn [Opens in a new window]
Simon Jackman
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
Bradley Spahn
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible—that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.

Type
Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 623 - 629
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aldrich, John H. 1995. Why Parties? The Origin and Transformation of Party Politics in America. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
American National Election Studies. 2014. User’s Guide and Codebook for the ANES 2012 Time Series Study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; and Stanford, CA: Stanford University.Google Scholar
American National Election Studies. 2016. User’s Guide and Codebook for the ANES 2012 Time Series Voter Validation Supplemental Data. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; and Stanford, CA: Stanford University. www.electionstudies.org/studypages/data/anes_timeseries_2012/anes_timeseries_2012_voteval_sav.zip.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 2009. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Berent, Matthew K., Krosnick, Jon A., and Lupia, Arthur. 2016. “Measuring Voter Registration and Turnout in Surveys: Do Official Government Records Yield More Accurate Assessments?” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (3): 597–621. https://doi.org/10.1093/poqnfw021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brady, Henry E., Verba, Sidney, and Schlozman, Kay Lehman. 1995. “Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation.” American Political Science Review 89 (2): 271–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, David. 2014. “Death by Data.” New York Times, November 4. www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/opinion/david-brooks-death-by-data.html.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Dayna L. 1991. “Who Are to Be the Electors? A Reflection on the History of Voter Registration in the United States.” Yale Law & Policy Review 9 (2): 370–404.Google Scholar
Fenno, Richard F. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Gerber, Alan S., Green, Donald P., and Larimer, Christopher W.. 2008. “Social Pressure and Vote Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment.” American Political Science Review 102 (1): 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilens, Martin. 2012. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Green, Donald P., and Gerber, Alan S.. 2006. “Can Registration-Based Sampling Improve the Accuracy of Midterm Election Forecasts?” Public Opinion Quarterly 70 (2): 197–223. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfj022.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hersh, Eitan D. 2015. Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hersh, Eitan D., and Nall, Clayton. 2015. “The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income-Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records.” American Journal of Political Science 60 (2): 289–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Highton, Benjamin, and Wolfinger, Raymond E.. 1998. “Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.” Political Behavior 20 (2): 79–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Issenberg, Sasha. 2012. The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. New York: Random House Digital, Inc.Google Scholar
Jackman, Simon, and Spahn, Bradley. 2019. “Why Does the American National Election Study Overestimate Voter Turnout?” Political Analysis 27 (2): 193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackman, Simon, and Spahn, Bradley. 2021. “Replication Data for: Politically Invisible in America.” Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PUYM1K.Google Scholar
Kilgore, Ed. 2016. “Clinton Campaign May Have Been Too Smart to Win.” New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/clinton-campaign-may-have-been-too-smart-to-win.html.Google Scholar
McDonald, Michael P. 2007. “The True Electorate: A Cross-Validation of Voter Registration Files and Election Survey Demographics.” Public Opinion Quarterly 71 (4): 588–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morris, Darcy Steeg, Keller, Andrew, and Clark, Brian. 2015. “An Approach for Using Administrative Records to Reduce Contacts in the 2020 Census.” Joint Statistical Meetings Proceedings, Government Statistics Section: 3278–92. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association.Google Scholar
Nickerson, David W. 2015. “Do Voter Registration Drives Increase Participation? For Whom and When?” Journal of Politics 77 (1): 88–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nyhan, Brendan, Skovron, Christopher, and Titiunik, Rocío. 2017. “Differential Registration Bias in Voter File Data: A Sensitivity Analysis Approach.” American Journal of Political Science 61 (3): 744–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, J. Gregory. 2011. Coverage of Population in Census 2000 Based on Demographic Analysis: The History Behind the Numbers. Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, Population Division.Google Scholar
Rogers, Todd, and Aida, Masa. 2013. “Vote Self-Prediction Hardly Predicts Who Will Vote, and Is (Misleadingly) Unbiased.” American Politics Research 42 (3): 503–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X13496453.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmidhauser, John R. 1963. “Residency Requirements for Voting and the Tensions of a Mobile Society.” Michigan Law Review 61 (4): 823–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigelman, Lee, and Jewell, Malcolm E.. 1986. “From Core to Periphery: A Note on the Imagery of Concentric Electorates.” Journal of Politics 48 (2): 440–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Squire, Peverill, Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Glass, David P.. 1987. “Residential Mobility and Voter Turnout.” American Political Science Review 81 (1): 45–66. www.jstor.org/stable/1960778.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Jackman and Spahn Dateset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PUYM1K
Link