The study of voter turnout in the United States has been dominated for decades by research designs focusing on self-reported, cross-sectional, individual-level survey data, typically focusing on presidential elections from 1972 onward. Many of these studies consider the effects of both state and federal election laws on registration and turnout. Despite the fact that most election rules governing the eligibility of citizens to vote and how they go about casting their ballots are determined by the states—and that there is wide variation across the states, over time, in the nature of these laws—few studies have focused on state-level, aggregate turnout as an approach to assessing the effects of election laws on turnout.
Melanie Jean Springer’s book addresses this oversight by examining how variations in state election laws from 1920 to 2000 affect voter turnout. As Springer reminds readers, when levels of voter turnout in presidential or off-year elections are reported, these levels are actually averages of turnout that vary in important ways across the states. She argues that understanding the effects of election laws on voter turnout requires an examination of turnout at the state level, given that each state has unique laws that influence who and how many vote.
“American electoral institutions” are conceptualized as the various laws under which states run their elections. The analyses consider a range of election laws, including those establishing voting qualifications (property requirements, literacy tests, poll tax, residency), features of the voter registration system (e.g., purge details, universal mail-in registration, Motor Voter registration, closing date, Election Day registration), and voting procedures (poll hours, in-person early voting, universal absentee voting).
Springer begins by documenting voter turnout at the national, regional, and state level in both presidential elections (1920–2000) and nonpresidential election years (1922–98), and by providing a valuable historical overview of the adoption of election laws in the states from 1920 to 2000. Key parts of the quantitative analysis are pooled, cross-sectional, time-series models of voter turnout estimated for all the states, as well as separately for the southern states and for nonsouthern states.
The author finds that, controlling for demographics and electoral competitiveness, restrictive laws that increase the costs of voting are associated with lower turnout. In contrast, expansive laws that reduce the costs of voting have varied and modest effects, at best, and these effects are observed only in nonsouthern states. The number of days before the election that voter registration closes, and the availability of Election Day registration, are the two more common recent reforms that impact turnout, although these two reforms are overshadowed in some senses by the sheer number of consistently significant effects of state demographics and electoral competitiveness as predictors of turnout. The over-time effects of expansive and restrictive laws also differ, with the (modestly) positive effects of expansive laws continuing to increase over multiple election cycles, while the effects of restrictive legislation taper off. In nonpresidential election years, the quantitative analyses yield similar results, but the estimated effects of any election laws are fewer in number and even more modest.
These comprehensive models are then followed by more detailed investigations of high turnout states and of the southern states. Springer finds no distinctive pattern of electoral institutions in the high turnout states—thus, no institutional solutions to low voter turnout—and also offers a more interesting examination of southern states. She finds (somewhat surprisingly) that adoption of the White primary has a positive effect on voter turnout, and that across historical periods, expansive reforms fail to enhance voter turnout in the southern states. She suggests that this set of findings likely reflects that in the context of long-term restrictive voting laws, hostile political climates, and depressed socioeconomic conditions—as in the southern states—the effects of any laws seeking to increase turnout are likely to be muted. Hence, time and space matter—individual responses to electoral reform are contingent on geographic and historical context.
These analyses lead Springer to a somewhat bleak conclusion regarding the potential of election reforms to increase voter turnout in the United States. She rightly suggests that future efforts should be more targeted to the unique needs and circumstances of the states—as determined by the social, historical, and cultural characteristics associated with voter turnout—yet she recognizes that these are the types of efforts least likely to emerge from the federal government.
How the States Shaped the Nation will be of great value to scholars of voter turnout, state politics, and American political development. The careful data collection required, along with the rich historical details of state electoral-reform adoption, are important contributions. This feature alone makes this book a must-read and must-cite in the study of electoral laws and voter turnout in the United States. The breadth of the analysis will surely raise questions by some as to particular modeling and measurement details, but these concerns will be resolved elsewhere. The more important question is whether and how the work advances what we know about the effects of state electoral reforms and what we know about voter turnout.
One of Springer’s ambitions in this work is to contribute to our understanding of individual-level turnout studies. On this point, her contribution is perhaps more subtle, but also important. The assumption in current studies, she notes, is that the effects of election reforms are the same regardless of political context and history. Her state-level analyses indeed demonstrate the importance of political context and history, often ignored in previous research. Just as important, however, they also underscore the distinctive impact of expansive, compared to restrictive, election laws—a distinction not emphasized or explored sufficiently in existing studies. And this is a key insight in the study of election reforms: Limiting engagement is not the same—in origin or impact—as allowing engagement. The same state politics and political culture that emerge to pass expansive versus restrictive laws are those that must provide the additional incentives to vote, once expansive structures are in place, while the administration of restrictive policies is assured to some extent by virtue of the policy enactment.
Where does this leave scholars of voter turnout? The adoption of these laws is now part of the information environment of elections in the United States, and so assessing what determines individuals’ responses to the adoption of more restrictive or expansive election laws is now a critical question. As Springer suggests, states that pass expansive laws are likely to also support their administration, and parties, candidates, and others likely react to them in their campaign strategies. Understanding the effects of these (other) electoral institutions is thus critical to a better understanding of electoral reform and voter turnout in the United States.
