Abstract
Voters often make the effort to go to the polls but effectively throw their vote away by leaving their ballot blank or intentionally spoiled. Typically construed as anomalous or errant, we argue that blank and spoiled ballots are empirically differentiable and politically informative. We consider self-reported vote choice from a nationally representative survey following the 2011 Bolivian elections, in which 60 percent of votes cast were blank or spoiled. We estimate a multinomial logit model, finding that both blank and null voting were driven by political concerns, though null voting was more common among politically sophisticated individuals.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 547-561 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Political Research Quarterly |
Volume | 67 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 12 2014 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Sociology and Political Science