Gender and race gaps in voting and over-reporting: An intersectional comparison of CCES with ANES data

ABSTRACT

It is widely recognized that women, and perhaps Black women in particular, are more likely to vote than men. However, this is based on self-reports of voting, which can be unreliable. The Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and American National Election Studies (ANES) help with this issue by validating votes. Here, we use the CCES and ANES data to take an intersectional approach to estimate the probability that men and women of different races over-report voting, and how it affects the gender gap in voting. We find that Anglo women are somewhat less likely to over-report voting, but Black men and women and Latinas may be more inclined to over-report. We find evidence that relying on self-reports may underestimate the degree to which women (Anglo, Black and Latina) are likely to vote. However, the CCES data estimate that Anglo men are more likely to vote than Anglo women. We examine the CCES data to better understand this unique finding and suggest there may be sampling issues with the CCES data.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender gap voting
• validated votes
• survey methods
• intersectionality
• over-reporting voting
• social desirability

Declaration of interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

¹ The EPQ-R lie scale is part of Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. It is designed to measure social desirability in responding to survey items.

² It was higher in 2016, but this is likely because of abstentions in voting for president by Republicans not supporting Donald Trump (Stewart et al., 2020).

³ For their web surveys they do use YouGov but state that it is still a probability sample since they randomly select from their target population.

⁴ In 2012, they also conducted some surveys on the web but only face-to-face responses were validated so we only report on these cases.

⁵ For more discussion of CCES’ vote validation process go to: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910/DVN/II2DB6s.

⁶ For more discussion of ANES’ vote validation process go to: (2012) https://electionstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/anes_timeseries_2012voteval_userguidecodebook.pdf and (2016) https://electionstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/anes_timeseries_2016voteval_userguidecodebook.pdf.

⁷ We also run the analysis using logit with fixed effects and run the analyses with and without weights. The conclusions were the same regardless, unless reported otherwise.

⁸ With the ANES data when we used the fixed effect model without weights, Black men were not more likely to over-report voting, but the relationship was not statistically significant (Odds ratio =.91; p =. 65).

⁹ It is possible, but we believe unlikely, that variation in question-wording and survey mode explain the difference in the gender gap with self-reports and variation in validation procedure affects the difference in the gender gap with validation.

¹⁰ We did run these analyses separately for each year. With the ANES data the yearly results did not differ substantially from the pooled results. With the CCES data, in 2016, 2014, 2006 Black, men and women were not more likely to vote measured by either validated or self-report variable. In 2010, Blacks were not more likely to vote based on validated votes. In 2010, Latinos were more likely to vote. For Latinas they voted at higher rates than white men in 2008 and 2012 but the difference was not statistically significant. But regarding Anglo women the only year where they did not vote at lower rates, with both measures, was 2008 where they were more likely to vote based on the validated variable, but the difference was not statistically significant. Also in 2014 and 2016 with the validated vote the gender gap for Anglos was not statistically significant.