Turnout rates differ across offices in a given election. In general, political scientists have found that as one proceeds down the ballot, from the most prominent races for national and statewide offices to the the least prominent races for state and local offices, voting rates decrease. This dropoff phenomenon is of interest, in part, because citizens who fail to vote in less prominent elections have already overcome existing psychological and structural barriers to turning out to vote. Still, for some reason they choose not to vote for certain offices even though this a relatively costless action given they are already in the voting booth. Differences in these dropoff rates might indicate how election specific stimuli affect voting behavior.
The ROAD files can be used at their lowest level of aggregation to study voting dropoff. The precinct level electoral data files contain information on voting for every contested office in a given general election. The data for this analysis would consist of a dropoff rate between two offices for each precinct in a state in a given year. Given how many observations there are available, it would be wise to do an analysis for a single state, or perhaps for one state at a time. It might even be worth dropping down to a separate analysis for each county for test runs.
In general, any analysis that involves only voting behavior can be examined using the precinct-level electoral data files. This is the lowest level at which voting behavior is measured in the ROAD project. There is no need to incorporate census data in this analysis. Hence, there is no need to use data aggregated to the MCD-group level.
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