Voter Turnout (and More) for the 2013 ALA Election

Last year, I analyzed voter turnout for the ALA election and speculated on why certain divisions did better than others (if turnout is a measure of member engagement). Now that data for this year is available, I thought I’d do the same and make some comparisons.

First, comparative turnout between divisions (with all of these graphs, click through for bigger versions):

(In this chart and throughout this post, what’s labeled as ALA voter turnout isn’t the overall turnout for all members; it’s how many members voted for Council and President of ALA — “Big ALA,” if you will.)

And let’s compare that to last year:

The good news is that while voter turnout fell slightly for “Big ALA” offices, turnout increased for eight of ALA’s eleven divisions. (I’m disappointed to see that YALSA’s voter turnout fell, since that’s the division I’m most invested in.) Our standouts were again ASCLA (small but mighty, it seems!) and United for Libraries (formerly ALTAFF), but this year, AASL’s turnout dropped quite a bit.

I speculated last year that AASL might have seen a bump because Barbara Stripling was running for President-Elect of ALA, and this year’s results may confirm that effect. Our candidates for President-Elect in the most recent election were most heavily involved with ALSC (Barbara Imroth) and ACRL (Courtney Young), which did both see increases in turnout over last year.

Speaking of changes over time, let’s take a look at how the youth-serving divisions and PLA did this year compared to previous years:

ALSC and PLA continued to see gains in turnout, but AASL and YALSA dropped off. I’m not sure I have great explanations for this, but I’m interested in continuing to watch these trends.

One of the things about the YALSA race that I thought was noteworthy was how close the election for President-Elect was: Chris Shoemaker won with just 51.9% — a difference of only 35 votes. (Some of the votes for YALSA award committees were even closer, and there was just a 9-vote difference in whether or not candidates made it to ALA Council.) But how does the YALSA presidential race compare with other divisions?

ALA President-Elect was also close, but most divisions were more decisive. (ASCLA is not included here because the candidate for President-Elect ran unopposed.) The average percentage to the victor was 59.9%, and AASL’s 76.5% is more than two standard deviations above that mean — definitely noteworthy, especially paired with their relatively low voter turnout. Did school librarians not vote because the outcome was somehow already predetermined, or are these two factors not linked?

I’m not sure these factors are linked — it doesn’t seem that turnout is affected by how close the race for president-elect was for any division.

One of the things I looked at last year was division size vs voter turnout, wondering if smaller divisions had more invested members and larger divisions felt less personal. For last year, it seemed that being really small was either great for you or terrible for you, but everyone else fell into the middle.

This year’s data isn’t particularly conclusive. ASCLA still knocks it out of the park and United for Libraries/ALTAFF is still lagging behind. It might be that this year, being a medium-sized division was bad for turnout and being either small or large was good, but that’s not especially clear.

I don’t have data for demographics for different divisions, but I’m still interested in whether or not age or geographic location matter — especially because we can compare voting habits in US elections to ALA elections once we have that.

So there’s some inconclusive or non-linked data here, but there are some interesting new patterns, too. I’ll definitely be tracking whether having a candidate for President-Elect of Big ALA affects voter turnout for different divisions in future years. And if voter turnout is a measure of member engagement, I’d definitely like to see YALSA do better next year.

What influences whether or not you vote?

Data for this post came from a variety of sources. Division membership stats were provided via email by Ron Jankowski, ALA’s Membership Development Director. Data on the closeness of particular races comes from the PDFs on ALA’s election page. Voter turnout data was provided via email by JoAnne Kempf, the Director of the Office of ALA Governance. I’m happy to provide raw data and my spreadsheets to anyone else who’s interested.

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