Political Polarization and Voter Turnout: A New Political Paradigm?

Political polarization has characterized most recent U.S. elections through further widening the gap between the two parties to the point that many people fear a second U.S. Civil war is approaching. This begs the larger question of how polarization impacts the electorate? Does it turn voters off or push them to vote? Does it have a negative impact on American elections, or is it merely a next step in the grand experiment we define as American democracy? This paper uses Logistic regression (via SPSS Statistics) with data from American National Election Studies (ANES) to address these questions by analyzing the motivations of voter turnout for the Presidential elections of 1992, 2008, and 2020, and whether certain factors including polarization either encourages or discourages voter turnout. Evaluated factors are polarization, race, family income, gender, education, partisan ID, and age. Previous scholarship is unclear with some arguing that polarization increases voter turnout while others believe that factors such as income or education have the most influence on voter. This study found that polarized citizens are more likely to vote than non-polarized citizens in all three elections, with progressively decreasing p values of <.1 to <.001 from 1992 to 2008 to 2020. Also, this study found a direct correlation (p values ranging from < .1 to <.001) between family income and education as related to a person’s likelihood to vote. Overall, this study confirms past scholarship supporting political polarization being a driving factor for voter turnout.