Between order and disorder: a 'weak law' on recent electoral behavior among urban voters?

Christian Borghesi,Jean-Pierre Nadal,Jean Chiche,Renaud Lambiotte

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039916

Abstract

A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting (Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution of this entropy (over all elections and countries) appears to be sharply peaked near a common value. This almost common value is typically shared since the 1970s by electorates of the most populated municipalities, and this despite the wide disparities between voting systems and types of elections. Performing different statistical analyses, we notably show that this stylized fact reveals particular correlations between the blank/null votes and abstentionists ratios. We suggest that the existence of this hidden regularity, which we propose to coin as a ‘weak law on recent electoral behavior among urban voters’, reveals an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of urban citizen voting behavior in modern democracies. Analyzing exceptions to the rule provides insights into the conditions under which this normative behavior can be expected to occur.

Highlights

Each election yields a variable proportion of citizens not taking part in the vote
Introducing a measure of civic involvement of electorate, we show that this quantity exhibits a sharply peaked distribution around a common value
We suggest that the common value S&1 of the entropy, which appears recently in high populated municipalities, reveals an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of citizen involvement in modern democracies, and we propose to call it a ‘weak law’ on recent electoral behavior among urban voters

Summary

Introduction

Each election yields a variable proportion of citizens not taking part in the vote. The proportion of the uninvolved population – either by non-registering, abstaining or voting blank or null – has been much less studied than the vote itself.Nowadays such behaviors are increasing among the longestestablished democracies and their meaning may be changing. Each election yields a variable proportion of citizens not taking part in the vote. The proportion of the uninvolved population – either by non-registering, abstaining or voting blank or null – has been much less studied than the vote itself. Nowadays such behaviors are increasing among the longestestablished democracies and their meaning may be changing. Besides passive abstention (due to carelessness or indifference), an active refusal of vote – possibly bearing a political message – is rising among population categories which are usually taking part in the election. The boundary between voters and nonvoters is blurred as several intermediate behaviors exist, such as non-registering or blank vote

Methods

Results

Conclusion