Vote Overreporting While Black: Identifying the Mechanism Behind Black Survey Respondents’ Vote Overreporting

• Author: Ismail White,Clinton Jenkins,Antoine Banks,Michael Hanmer
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211022189
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X211022189

American Politics Research

2021, Vol. 49(5) 439 –451

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X211022189

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Article

Surveys have long been the most important way by which

social scientists learn about the public’s political opinions

and behavior, including whether or not they’ve decided to

turn out to vote. We’ve long known that some individuals

often report that they’ve voted in the most recent election

when, in fact, they have not—a phenomena known as over-

reporting (see e.g., Clausen, 1968; Traugott & Katosh, 1979).

This is readily apparent when one compares the percentage

of survey respondents in nationally representative surveys

who reported voting to the actual voter turnout rates in an

election, such as with the American National Election

Studies, which see overreport rates ranging from 8% to 21%

(Ansolabehere & Hersh, 2012; Belli et al., 2001; Enamorado

& Imai, 2020). Additionally, rates of overreporting vary

across demographic characteristics with African American

respondents estimated to overreport as much as 9-points

higher than their white counterparts (Bernstein et al., 2001).

In this paper, we revisit the phenomenon of African

American overreporting and test two explanations for why

Black respondents might overreport voting more than other

racial groups. We examine the social dynamics of the survey-

interview process, investigating how racial group identifica-

tion and the likely social pressure to conform with the norms

of Black political behavior encourages respondent overre-

porting. We find that the need to conform to norms of Black

political behavior, activated by the presence of Black inter-

viewers, appears to be the chief causal mechanism

underlying Black respondents’ overreporting in the ANES.

These results suggest that the common practice of race

matching Black interviewers with Black respondents may

greatly inflate Black voter turnout in surveys. In addition, we

suggest our theory and findings speak more broadly to the

sorts of social pressure that Black Americans may face in

everyday life to misreport the extent of their political behav-

ior to other individuals within their community. We engage

with this idea more substantively in the conclusion.

Overreporting: Overview and Causes

Perhaps the biggest challenge for those who wish to use sur-

vey data to accurately understand the causes or effects of

voter turnout is that individuals do not overreport voting at

the same rate. Instead, the likelihood that someone overre-

ports their turnout varies across a variety of demographic and

psychological factors including income, satisfaction with the

status-quo (Silver et al., 1986), education (e.g., Bernstein

1022189APRXXX10.1177/1532673X211022189American Politics ResearchJenkins et al.

research-article2021

1Birmingham-Southern College, AL, USA

2Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

3University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Corresponding Author:

Clinton Jenkins, Birmingham-Southern College, 900 Arkadelphia Road,

Birmingham, AL 35254, USA.

Email: cmjenkin@bsc.edu

Vote Overreporting While Black:

Identifying the Mechanism Behind Black

Survey Respondents’ Vote Overreporting

Clinton Jenkins1, Ismail White2, Michael Hanmer3,

and Antoine Banks3

Abstract

It is now a well-documented fact of survey research that Black survey respondents overreport turning out to vote at higher

rates than many of their peers of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. We bring renewed attention to this phenomenon

by investigating how the ways in which the race of the interviewer might influence a Back respondent’s propensity to

overreport turning out to vote. In this paper, we test two competing mechanisms for African American overreporting and

race of interviewer effects: (1) racial group linked fate, and (2) conformity with norms of Black political behavior. We find

support that social pressure to conform to group norms of political behavior is behind Black respondent’s overreporting in

the presence of a same-race interviewer. These results have significant implications for how we view, analyze, and consider

results from such studies.

Keywords

turnout, Black political behavior, overreporting, turnout misreporting, survey analysis