election-law_gl-digest      Friday, June 1 2001      Volume 01 : Number 026




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Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 16:16:23 -0700
From: Charlene Simmons <csimmons@LIBRARY.CA.GOV>
Subject: Electoral Acceleration

The National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., has published an
interesting paper in its "Working Paper Series" (April 2001; #8252),
entitled "Electoral Acceleration: The Effect of Minority Population on
Minority Voter Turnout."  The authors are Feliez Oberholzer-Gee and Joel
Waldfogel at the Wharton School.   The abstract states in part:

"Using both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on turnout, we
show that citiziens are more likely to vote if they live in a jurisdiction with
a larger number of persons sharing similar political preferences.  As a
result, chages in the identify of a distric'ts median citizen lead to even
larger changes in the identity of its median voter, a phenomenon we term
electoral acceleration...in part due to the structure of media markets."

Charlene Wear Simmons, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
California Research Bureau

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End of election-law_gl-digest V1 #26
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