Voting alone: Early voting and turnout in couples

Low-turnout groups have less knowledge and understanding of politics. Therefore, their decision to vote may depend more on their family/partner, in which case voting is more of a social than an individual act. The increased use of early voting makes voting more individualized, and we ask if that has a detrimental effect on the propensity to vote in certain groups. If the partner votes prior to election day does that influence the turnout decision of the other partner? Based on administrative voter data covering the entire Norwegian population over several elections, we find that low-propensity voters in couples are demobilized by a partner's early vote, whereas, if anything, the opposite is true for high-propensity voters. There is no demobilization effect in a placebo analysis of couples who divorce between two elections, which suggests that demobilization among couples is not purely driven by selection into early voting.