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Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Benjamin Highton
Benjamin Highton
Affiliation:
Benjamin Highton (bhighton@ucdavis.edu) is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Davis
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Abstract

In a democracy, voting is the most fundamental act of political participation and therefore holds a central location in the study of political behavior. One significant research tradition focuses on the relationship between registration and turnout and raises important and related questions. How do registration laws influence turnout levels? What types of people are most affected by them? What are the partisan implications of registration requirements? Spanning the late nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries, this essay places these questions in the appropriate theoretical context and then answers them.Previously Benjamin Highton was an APSA Congressional Fellow and worked for Senator Paul Wellstone on health and welfare policy. He appreciates the advice and criticism from Henry Brady, Jennifer Hochschild, Randolph Siverson, Raymond Wolfinger, and the anonymous referees for Perspectives on Politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 507 - 515
Copyright
© 2004 American Political Science Association

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