Perceived Election Closeness and Voter Turnout

As part of my Economics degree at Pomona College, I had to complete a senior seminar course. The course was the culmination of what I had learned throughout my economics degree and required a final project that met the standards of a publishable research paper. With my classmate, Franco, we co-authored a paper linking the effect of perceived closeness (based on pre-election polling) on the effect of Voter Turnout in US presidential elections. This nationwide study worked on the state level, due to the electoral college’s statewide, winner-take-all system.

Our sample size was small due to a lack of sufficient state-level polling data for elections earlier than 2012, and we found no statistically significant effect of perceived closeness on voter turnout.