Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate

Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political analysis 2012-10, Vol.20 (4), p.437-459
Main Authors: Ansolabehere, Stephen, Hersh, Eitan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Demography
Elections
Electorate
Indexes (Measures)
Participation
Political analysis
Political Behavior
Political parties
Public records
Representation
Respondents
Sampling methods
Validity
Voter behavior
Voter registration
Voter Turnout
Voters
Voting
Voting behavior
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Summary:Social scientists rely on surveys to explain political behavior. From consistent overreporting of voter turnout, it is evident that responses on survey items may be unreliable and lead scholars to incorrectly estimate the correlates of participation. Leveraging developments in technology and improvements in public records, we conduct the first-ever fifty-state vote validation. We parse overreporting due to response bias from overreporting due to inaccurate respondents. We find that nonvoters who are politically engaged and equipped with politically relevant resources consistently misreport that they voted. This finding cannot be explained by faulty registration records, which we measure with new indicators of election administration quality. Respondents are found to misreport only on survey items associated with socially desirable outcomes, which we find by validating items beyond voting, like race and party. We show that studies of representation and participation based on survey reports dramatically misestimate the differences between voters and nonvoters.
ISSN:1047-1987
1476-4989
DOI:10.1093/pan/mps023