tombarton.bsky.social
Post-Doc at King's
PhD from Royal Holloway
Poli Sci, Turnout and Electoral Integrity
Now dabbling in interest groups on the ERC ADVODID project
advodid.eu
27 posts
186 followers
183 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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Reminds of when I was applying for my PhD on the advanced quantitative methods steer the ERSC had, one condition was to use big data, turns out big data ≈ have statistical power at the aggregate level
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Congrats Dr Kenn!
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Thanks Ralph!
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Apologies my mistake
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So when will we know the *true* impact of this more restrictive voter ID? The next General Election...perhaps (10/10)
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Yes voter ID won't be required in tomorrow's Welsh elections. But these are PCC elections, so with their extremely low turnout comparing with English PCC elections would be problematic (9/n)
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Therefore, what will initial turnout figures tell us about this new ID law? Not a lot. As academic literature suggests this effect is likely to be particular to certain groups and a more in-depth analysis will be needed - watch this space 😜 (8/n)
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Which is not conditional on anything else but requires significant input by the voter. This has, primarily, time costs but also knowledge and monetary costs. From local elections last year actual usage was significantly below expected usage. (7/n)
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Other such alternatives include the over 60s Oyster, Disabled parking badge and EEA identity card. All of which cost or are conditional on something else. Therefore, the 2022 Election Act provides for the Voter Authority Certificate. (6/n)
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Of course there are alternative IDs available. For disabled and older voters in London the next logical ID would be the Freedom Pass, outside of London it would be the equivalent bus pass. Which is fine if you have the ability or need to use such a pass. (5/n)
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It is likely to be people who can: 1. Afford to go abroad 2. Afford a car 3. Allowed to drive a car
This indicates that, perhaps, several groups stand to be impacted by this new law. Poorer voters, younger voter and older voters. (4/n)
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We know from pilot schemes that passport and driving licences are the most popular form of ID that was used www.electoralcommission.org.uk/research-rep.... So we can then think who is most likely to own such ID (3/n)
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Can we expect this more restrictive voter ID to make a difference? Well... maybe. The difficulty in predicting or at all measuring any individual level effect is that we don't always have reliable info on ID ownership. Instead we have to make some *big* assumptions (2/n)
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Thanks Ralph!
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p.s. If you ever wanted to start learning Bayesian statistics, here's a great place to start: youtu.be/7GgLSnQ48os?...
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If you want to know more do get in touch! (9\9)
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Obviously a huge thank you must go to my supervisors @chanret.bsky.social and Olli Heath for the past 3+ years and my examiners on the day @florianfoos.bsky.social and Toby James for very valuable comments. (8\n)
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The thesis then concluded by discussing what's next as what I have done is only the start for comparative voter ID research. Having started work on the thesis 5 years ago as part of my undergrad dissertation yesterday was a great way to conclude it all. (7\n)
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The last paper then causally identified this turnout effect with a case study of the 2018 UK pilots. Using a combination of synthetic control and diff-in-diff I showed that the scheme implemented by Bromley lowered turnout by circa 3.6% points, at a General Election this could be significant. (6\n)
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This was repeated with perceived integrity. Again, models showed that more restrictive laws are associated with lower integrity or no difference. This implies that more restrictive laws fail to improve integrity, which has been their stated aim. This was true for levels of fraud in particular (5\n)
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Next I used this data to test the association between more restrictive laws and turnout. Given we know a lot about the determinates of turnout I took a Bayesian approach to get a more precise estimate. Models showed that more restrictive laws are associated with lower turnout. (4\n)
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This is all well and good but to measure these effects I needed a single data source on voter ID laws around the world, which didn't exist so I created it and published it here: doi.org/10.1080/0034...
(3\n)
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I set the thesis in the context of rational choice, more restrictive voter ID laws place a greater cost on voters, thus they are less likely to turnout and they place extra costs on administrators so integrity is unlikely to improve. (2\n)