1

Paper

Who Votes By Mail? A Dynamic Model of the Individual-Level Consequences of Vote-by-Mail Systems Berinsky, Adam Burns, Nancy Traugott, Michael Uploaded 04-17-1998 Keywords turnout vote-by-mail duration analysis continuous-time multistate duration model Abstract Throughout the years, a number of changes have been proposed to electoral laws with the aim of increasing voter turnout and altering the composition of the electorate to make it more reflective of the voting age population. The most recent of these innovations is voting-by-mail (VBM). While the use of VBM has spread through the United States, little empirical evaluation of the impact of VBM has been undertaken to date. The analysis presented here fills this gap in our knowledge by assessing the impact of VBM on the Oregon electorate through a multistate duration analysis (Heckman and Singer, 1984; Heckman and Walker, 1986, 1991) that takes into account other factors associated with election administration and characteristics of individual voters. This methodology has the added advantage of providing a reasonable basis for extrapolation of these effects to other jurisdictions. The results of our research suggest that VBM does increase voter turnout in the aggregate, although its effects are not uniform across all groups in the electorate. More importantly, it does not seem to exert any influence on the partisan composition of the electorate. From a methodological perspective, the use of a multistate duration analysis provides a promising approach to extrapolating the impact of a policy change from one jurisdiction to another when appropriate data are available in each.

2

Paper

Electoral Reform and Legislative Structure: The Effects of Australian Ballot Laws on House Committee Tenure Katz, Jonathan Sala, Brian R. Uploaded 01-01-1995 Keywords congress personal vote australian ballot duration model Abstract Most scholars agree that members of Congress are strongly motivated by their desire for reelection. This assumption implies that MCs adopt institutions, rules and norms of behavior in part to serve their electoral interests. Direct tests of the electoral connection are rare, however, because significant, exogenous changes in the electoral environment are difficult to identify. In this paper, we develop and test an electoral rationale for the norm of committee tenure, in which returning MCs typically retain their same assignments. We examine tenure patterns before and after a major, exogenous change in the electoral system -- the states' rapid adoption of Australian Ballot laws in the early 1890s. The ballot changes, we argue, induced new ``personal vote'' electoral incentives, which contributed to the adoption of ``modern'' Congressional institutions such as ``property rights'' to committee assignments. We demonstrate that there was a marked increase in assignment stability after 1892, when a majority of states had put the new ballot laws into force -- earlier than previous studies have suggested.