LITTLE WHITE LIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE MODELS CORRELATED RESPONSE ERRORS IN A PANEL STUDY OF VOTING

Abstract

One interpretation for the common survey finding that the background characteristics of vote overreporters resemble those of actual voters is that misreporters usually vote. This hypothesis—that misreporters regularly voted in earlier elections—is tested with data from the 1972–74–76 Michigan Election Panel. It receives no support: the 1972 and 1974 validated turnout of the 1976 misreporters was very low. Moreover, misreporting was a fairly stable respondent characteristic: misreporting about an election in one interview was correlated with misreporting about the remaining elections in each of the other two interviews. A comparison of regressions predicting turnout using the validated reports versus the self-reports shows that the respondent errors can distort conclusions about the correlates of voting. For example, controlling for three other variables, education was related to self-reported voting but not to validated voting. Here, as well as in surveys of other socially desirable or undesirable issues, respondent self-reports may bias survey data in favor of commonsense models of the world.