“Manipulated Date and Motivated Vote: How Changing Election Dates Shapes Turnout” ​ (manuscript)

Abstract: Autocracies exploit elections as a tool of political control, but we lack theory and evidence for understanding how manipulated election schedules shape citizens’ political participation. Conventional wisdom suggests that electoral manipulation demobilizes voters. This paper, however, argues that manipulated election dates mobilize voters because this manipulation signals regime weakness. Citizens anticipate the next election will be more tightly contested and therefore become more likely to turn out. Evidence from an original survey experiment in Hong Kong demonstrates that election postponement motivates both opposition and government supporters to vote. However, framing election postponement as a signal of government weakness increases opposition turnout, while framing postponement as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic or a regime strategy to deter opposition mobilization increases the turnout of government supporters. Finally, the evidence indicates that election postponement has second order effects that shape voter turnout by boosting citizens’ beliefs that other citizens will be more likely to vote and protest when the election date shifts. The findings suggest that ordinary citizens learn about regime strength from the information revealed by manipulated election schedules, with implications for election turnout and authoritarian stability.

Presented at MPSA 2022, SPSA Summer Meeting 2022, APSA 2022, SPSA 2023, Virtual Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes (VWAR, Feb 1, 2023), and Chinese Politics Research in Progress (CPRP, Jan 26, 2024).