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The Turnout Rate among Eligible Voters in the States, 1980–2000

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Michael P. McDonald
Michael P. McDonald*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Springfield
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Abstract

Aggregate voter turnout rates in the United States have been used in many political science studies, as both a dependent and an independent variable. Most of these studies use the voting-age population as the denominator in their turnout rate measure. However, the voting-age population is not the same as the population of eligible voters. I demonstrate why this distinction matters and outline the steps to construct the voting-eligible population for each of the states from 1980–2000 to provide more accurate measures of state-level voter turnout rates.

Type
The Practical Researcher
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 199 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association, 2002

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