Increase Voter Participation

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An increase in the literacy rate is expected to increase voter participation, as with education people become more concerned about politics and confident to express their preference. Education also makes people tolerant to opposing views, less extreme and capable of making more rational decisions (Lipset, 1959). People with more education and experience have a lower cost of acquiring information and thus their cost of voting is lower than that of an uneducated voter whose limited stock of knowledge leads to a higher cost of processing information causing them to opt out of participating in elections. This is also supported by Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980). According to the U.S. Census 2010 Current Population Survey only 35% of those with …show more content…

Economic development will lead to the creation and dissemination of socio-economic resources. Voters would have increased access to information and the country would benefit from other effects such as higher levels of education and income. Economic development would change the way society interacts and this would hopefully increase the political involvement of citizens and in turn increase voter turnout. A set of cross-national studies of voter participation in advanced industrialized countries found support for the claim that increasing the cognitive and material cost of voting reduces the turnout of the poor and uneducated (Jusko & Shively 2005, Gallego 2009, Nevitte, Blais, Gidengil & Nadeau …show more content…

Staying in one area would increase an individual’s knowledge of that area and the candidates, which would mean that the voter’s cost of obtaining information is low and as a result they would choose to vote (Filer et al., 1993). The expected benefit from voting is affected by the size of the population (Owen and Grofman, 1984; Mueller, 2003). So, the greater the size of the community the smaller the probability that a single voter will make a difference hence is reducing the expected utility from voting and lowering voter participation. The level of population concentration is important as well. Urbanization can lead to a weakening of interpersonal bonds, primary social structures and consensus on norms (Hoffman-Martinot, 1994, Wirth, 1938). The argument here is that cities do not have the same pressure as rural areas for individuals to turnout to vote. This ‘social pressure’ argument builds on the idea that voting is a civic duty, people who decided not to vote may hurt their social reputations (Riker and Ordeshook, 1968; Overbye,

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