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

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 electrons - is 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.