Rethinking the partisan effects of higher turnout: So what's the question?

Controversy persists over the link between turnout and the likelihood of su ccess of Democratic candidates (e.g., DeNardo, 1980, 1986; Zimmer, 1985; Tu cker and Vedlitz, 1986; Piven and Cloward, 1988; Texeira, 1992; Radcliff, 1 994, 1995; Erikson, 1995a, b). We argue that the authors in this debate hav e largely been talking past one another because of a failure to distinguish three quite different questions. The first question is: "Are low turnout v oters more likely to vote Democratic than high turnout voters?'' The second question is: "Should we expect that elections in which turnout is higher a re ones in which we can expect Democrats to have done better?'' The third q uestion is the counterfactual: "If turnout were to have increased in some g iven election, would Democrats have done better?'' We show the logical inde pendence of the first two questions from one another and from the third, an d argue that previous researchers have failed to recognize this logical ind ependence - sometimes thinking they were answering question three when in f act they were answering either question one or question two. Reviewing prev ious research, we find that the answer to the first question once was YES b ut, for more recent elections at the presidential level, now appears to be NO, while, for congressional and legislative elections, the answer to the s econd question appears generally to be NO. However, the third question is e ssentially unanswerable absent an explicit model of why and how turnout can be expected to increase, and/or analyses of individual level panel data. T hus, the cross-sectional and pooled data analyses of previous research are of almost no value in addressing this third question.