The effect of signing ballot petitions on turnout

ABSTRACTDo ballot initiatives increase voter turnout? Some studies find a strong impact while others find the relationship to be modest and/or conditional. Either way, the underlying mechanism is not well understood. Here, we build on past work by hypothesizing that signing a ballot petition acts as a personalized form of campaign contact, increasing the likelihood of turnout. Previous investigations have been aggregate in nature, or have had to rely on either samples of petition signers or county-level inferences. We procured the complete lists of initiative petitions signers for two recent, high-profile state ballot measures in Arkansas, among the most frequent direct democracy users among the American states. By supplementing these individual-level data with the state voter file, we assess the impact of having signed a petition, controlling for age and vote history. Our results confirm earlier findings that signing a petition increases the probability of voter turnout, especially among irregular voters. This has consequences for both candidate and initiative elections in jurisdictions that, like Arkansas, conduct both elections at the same time. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Still other thinkers have hypothesized a role for ideology in the initiative-turnout relationship. Popularly-initiated same-sex marriage bans and marijuana-legalization measures, for example, have been said to have energized conservative and progressive turnout, respectively (e.g., Smith, DeSantis, and Kassel Citation2006). However, Biggers (Citation2014) finds no evidence that such measures increased turnout for any particular group, nor were there marked turnout increases among voters generally perceived as being concerned with moral issues, such as poorer, older, or fundamentalist Christian voters.2 The 2014 minimum-wage initiative was “An Act to Increase the Arkansas Minimum Wage.” The measure gradually increased the state’s minimum wage from $6.25 an hour to $8.50 an hour by 2017 (UADA Public Policy Center Citation2014). The 2016 marijuana initiative was “The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2016,” and stood to legalize the medical use of cannabis in the State of Arkansas (UADA Public Policy Center Citation2016).3 Arkansas law establishes the minimum number of signers for a petition to be put to vote as eight percent of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election for initiated acts. The 2014 petition therefore required 62,547 signatures (eight percent of the 2010 election), and the 2016 petition, a constitutional amendment, required 67,887 (eight percent of the 2014 election).4 To test the robustness of these models, we conducted four additional analyses with controls for county-level percent Black and Hispanic and county median income. The results of these models are reported in the appendix and do not affect the robustness of the individual-level-only models.5 We estimate marginal effects for continuous variables as the difference in predicted probability shifting the variable two standard deviations across the mean (i.e. x̄ ± σ).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by University of Arkansas.