Political culture's effect on voter turnout: the 2004 election and beyond

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2008-01-01
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Brown, Narren
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Kimberly H. Conger
Mack Shelley
Ray Dearin
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Political Science
The Department of Political Science has been a separate department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (formerly the College of Sciences and Humanities) since 1969 and offers an undergraduate degree (B.A.) in political science, a graduate degree (M.A.) in political science, a joint J.D./M.A. degree with Drake University, an interdisciplinary degree in cyber security, and a graduate Certificate of Public Management (CPM). In addition, it provides an array of service courses for students in other majors and other colleges to satisfy general education requirements in the area of the social sciences.
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Abstract

I provide an account of the psychological elements that combine within an actor, motivating them to vote. Political scientists have written extensively on voter turnout, however, no one has attempted to explain turnout based primarily on political culture. Political culture has improved our understanding of states, parties, and elections alike. This thesis uses political culture in an ordinal scale as the primary explanatory variable in an OLS regression. Political culture has rarely been used as an explanatory variable and to my knowledge never as an ordinal scale. I posit that political culture, like a sense of civic duty, or any other "interpersonal influence" can and does become a motivating force in an actor's decision to vote and acts as a long-term aggregate psychological influence in the act of voting and as. This relationship is explored via the use of data from the 2004 presidential election.

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Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2008