Electoral Salience and Vote Overreporting: Another Look at the Problem of Validity in Voter Turnout Studies

In this note, I rely on the notion of electoral salience as the institutional setting determining the "stakes" of an election, as well as on the notion of political awareness as defined by Zaller (1992). Emphasizing two variables positively correlated with turnout overreporting -- education and party contact -- I argue they are also likely to be positively correlated with political awareness and knowledge. As a result, they should enhance respondents ability to distinguish between different levels of electoral salience, boosting overreporting in high-salience elections, but not in low-salience ones. Adapted from the source document.