Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on October 31, 2007
Public Opinion Quarterly 2007 71(4):649-660; doi:10.1093/poq/nfm040
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Bringing Registration into Models of Vote Overreporting
Address correspondence to Andrew S. Fullerton; e-mail: andrew.fullerton{at}okstate.edu
Voting is a socially desirable act and a basic form of political participation in the United States. This social desirability sometimes leads respondents in surveys, such as the National Election Study (NES), to claim to have voted when they did not. The methodology of previous studies assumes that people only overreport voting and that the sample of potential overreporters (i.e., nonvalidated voters) is not systematically different from the sample of potential voters. In this research note, we explore several different ways of examining the determinants of overreporting at two different stages (registering and voting) and with a consideration for selection bias. Comparing the traditional probit model used in previous research with sequential and heckit probit models, we find that the determinants of overreporting registering and voting differ substantially. In addition, there is a significant selection effect at the registration stage of overreporting. We conclude with a discussion of contemporary implications for pre-election polling and the postelection analysis of survey data.
Received for publication April 20, 2005. Revision received April 25, 2006. Accepted for publication October 17, 2006.
ANDREW S. FULLERTON is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Oklahoma State University, OK, USA. JEFFREY C. DIXON is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. CASEY BORCH is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL, USA. The authors presented a previous version of this paper at the 2006 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in Boston, MA. The authors would like to thank Sam Best, Simon Cheng, Kristine Hoffman, Michael Wallace, Jun Xu, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. They would also like to thank Dave Howell for his help regarding issues related to the NES data. Any errors in this work are the authors’ alone.