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Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people who would otherwise have voted for Obama to vote for McCain, for a nonmajor party candidate, or not to vote at all, (2) people who would not have voted to vote for McCain instead, and (3) people who would have voted for a nonmajor party candidate to vote for McCain instead. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Opinion Quarterly Oxford University Press

Determinants of Turnout and Candidate Choice in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

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References (64)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Subject
Article
ISSN
0033-362X
eISSN
1537-5331
DOI
10.1093/poq/nfp079
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The presence of an African-American candidate on the ballot running for President in 2008 raises the possibility that the election outcome might have been influenced by anti-African-American racism among voters. This paper uses data from the Associated Press-Yahoo News-Stanford University survey to explore this possibility, using measures of both explicit racism (symbolic racism) and implicit racism (the Affect Misattribution Procedure). The parameters of multinomial logistic regression equations were estimated to test the hypotheses that racism might have behaved differently on election day than they would have had racism been eliminated. The findings suggest that racism's impact on the election outcome could have been substantial, by causing (1) people who would otherwise have voted for Obama to vote for McCain, for a nonmajor party candidate, or not to vote at all, (2) people who would not have voted to vote for McCain instead, and (3) people who would have voted for a nonmajor party candidate to vote for McCain instead.

Journal

Public Opinion Quarterly – Oxford University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2009

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