Controversy and Costs: Investigating the Consensus on American Voter ID Laws
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Controversy and Costs: Investigating the Consensus on American Voter ID Laws John V. Kane1 · David C. Wilson2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Voter identification laws (VID) potentially affect who votes and who wins elections, making debates about them highly contentious among national elites and state legislatures. Yet the debate is far more muted among members of the public, with over three quarters of Americans supporting a photo identification requirement to vote, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. Research points to several factors that affect opinion on VID; however, these studies have not led to a theoretical framework for understanding the broad consensus of public support. We propose that the public generally views policies requiring ID to vote as commonsensical, uncontroversial, and essentially costless insofar as most people (likely) possess the necessary ID. These perceptions, we argue, undergird the sizable public consensus on VID. If true, then when presented with dissonant information cueing controversy and increasing the costs of compliance with the law, we should expect support to substantially decline. We test these hypotheses using observational and experimental data. We find that citizens are significantly less supportive of an ID requirement upon learning of lower public support, and become dramatically less supportive when obtaining such identification involves some degree of cost. This latter result also holds among Republicans—a group that has long-been exceptionally supportive of VID. We conclude that the strong public consensus on voter ID is, in large part, a result of its costlessness to most citizens combined with limited familiarity with the policy, its controversial nature, and the costs potentially incurred by other citizens to comply with the law. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09643-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * John V. Kane [email protected] David C. Wilson [email protected] 1
Center for Global Affairs, New York University, 15 Barclay Street, New York, NY 10007, USA
2
Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware, 4 Kent Way, Newark, DE 19716, USA
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Political Behavior
Keywords Voter identification · Voter ID laws · Cues · Policy opinion · Partisanship Among elected officials and other political and media elites, voter identification (ID) laws have become an increasingly contentious issue (Hicks et al. 2015). A prominent argument against such laws is that they operate, in effect, as a “poll tax” (Citrin et al. 2014; Ellis 2008), imposing “significant and unequal obstacles” (Barreto et al. 2009) on those who may not have the proper forms of ID needed to participate in elections due to the costs of acquiring them. The ostensibly disadvantaged groups include those with lower socio-economic status, new voters, urban resident
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