Voter Turnout

Meredith Rolfe held a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellowship at Nuffield College prior to becoming a Senior Research Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her dissertation was awarded the Mancur Olsen Dissertation Grant by the APSA Political Economy section. Rolfe has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation, the British Academy, Oxford's John Fell Fund, the EU-sponsored Equalsoc Framework and the Oxford University Centre of Corporation Reputation. Her work has appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly and L'Année Sociologique, and she was an invited contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology and the Oxford Handbook of Corporate Reputation.

“In Voter Turnout, Meredith Rolfe presents a dramatically new and different account of one of the most studied of political behaviors, turnout. Her explanation is of turnout as a social act. She develops a rigorous theory what she calls conditional decision making, that is decision making that varies in precise ways when embedded in different networks. She is able to derive interesting implications of this theory and contrast it with the more usual account, what she would call unconditional decision making. And she is able to test this account, among other things providing a very different explanation of education and turnout. This is a theoretically innovative and rigorous explanation that all must take seriously.”—John Aldrich, Duke University

• 1. Introduction; 2. Conditional choice; 3. The social meaning of voting; 4. Conditional cooperation; 5. Conditional voters; 6. The social theory of turnout; 7. Education and high salience elections; 8. Mobilization and turnout in low salience elections; 9. Paradox lost.