Self-Reported versus Proxy-Reported Voter Turnout in the Current Population Survey

Abstract

The Current Population Survey (CPS) Voter Supplement is a premier source of data on turnout in the United States. A little-known aspect of the survey is that for a sizable proportion of people, turnout is measured by proxy—one member of a household reports for another member—rather than self-reports of having voted. The purpose of this research note is to investigate how the use of proxy-reported turnout affects conclusions about the determinants of turnout in America. The results suggest a generally optimistic assessment. Although proxy-reported turnout is about 4 percentage points lower than self-reported turnout, the individual-level correlates of turnout and interstate turnout differences are mostly similar for the two measures.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.