Highton, B. (2000). Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Electoral Participation. Political Behavior, 22(2), 109–120.
This article aims to determine what causes Americans who move often to vote less than those who stay put. (Highton, 2000) The author hypothesizes that this lower turnout is caused by a lack of reregistration by those moving as well as by those-moving’s weaker connection to the local community. In order to investigate this phenomenon and support or disprove these hypotheses, the author presents multiple tables of data from a span of National Election Studies, which are academic surveys run before and after every election. The author uses NESs from 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 that compare the amount of time someone has lived in their home and various demographic and socio-economic factors with whether or not they voted. The author uses this large span of years to obtain an average result that is not affected by any turnout outliers. They concluded that the loss of social ties is far less important to whether one votes or not as the need to reregister does, as there is a negligible difference in turnout between those who moved within their communities, and those who moved outside their communities
