How Bad Weather Excludes Marginal Voters from Turning Out for Election

• In Event: Papers That Study Voting Behavior With Clever Identification Strategies

Abstract

The small experiences of everyday life affect individuals in many ways. Ostensibly random and inconsequential experiences such as those related to local weather can have significant political effects. However, there is much conflicting evidence about whether bad weather decreases voter turnout by raising the cost of going to the polling place. This paper provides new evidence to the matter by utilizing individual-level time series of validated voting behavior across 10 years of local and national elections merged with socio-demographics and fine-grained meteorological observations. The key result is that bad weather, precipitation in particular, does in fact deter potential voters. Most importantly, marginal voters, i.e., individuals with a fluctuating voting history, are more susceptible to negative shocks caused by bad weather. As part of the robustness check, the coin is flipped to determine if participation increases when the weather brightens up. The results suggest that bad weather exacerbates inequalities in democratic participation. The policy implication is that efforts to include marginal voters in the democratic process should be intensified at elections with bad weather.

Keywords: electoral turnout, individual time series, weather, marginal voter, cost of voting

Authors

• Søren Damsbo-Svendsen, University of Copenhagen

• Kasper M. Hansen, University of Copenhagen