This article examines social-distance effects on non-response to a survey about voting in president elections. Four-year data collected in Taiwan Social Change Surveys from 2000 to 2005 were used to explore the extent to which socio-demographic difference and the index of social distance between respondents and interviewers resulted in non-response over time. The results, based on a 2-Level Hierarchical Multinomial Logistic Regression Model, show that three types of non-response(i.e. refusal, don't remember, and invalid ballot) are influenced by the distances of gender, marriage, age, and education between respondents and interviewers. Some effects vary with survey period over time. The effect is more significant for items that need longer-term memory to answer, for example, whom respondents voted for in elections.
