Walkability and Voter Turnout

By: Stone Nielon, Anand E. Sokhey

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Do features of the built environment influence rates of political participation? In this paper we consider the relationship between walkability—i.e.,the ease of walking to amenities in an area—and turnout in the contemporary United States. Focusing on census block groups in the country’s 25 most populated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we leverage the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) walkability indices and aggregate voting data from the 2016, 2018, and 2020 election cycles. We find that areas with higher walkability have higher official turnout; this association obtains across primary and general election contests, in the presence of controls for a variety of socioeconomic factors, and under different modeling choices. In subsequent analyses we bring in novel data on the difficulty of voting in states to consider whether the apparent benefits of walkability can be better understood through traditional notions of “cost-based” versus socially-grounded theories of mass behavior. Our results suggest that both explanations have purchase, though on balance we think the evidence points more towards social factors. We discuss the implications of our findings as they relate to both political geography and longstanding theories of democratic functioning.