Presidentialism and Voter Turnout in Legislative Elections

Abstract

What is the influence of presidentialism on legislative turnout? Does it matter for electoral participation if the presidential and legislative elections are held on the same day or not? If any, what is the confounding impact of the electoral system type? This article uses a sample of more than 450 democratic legislative elections between 1990 and 2010 to evaluate these three research questions. Distinguishing three types of regimes: (1) parliamentary systems, (2) presidential systems with concurrent presidential and legislative elections and (3) presidential systems with non-concurrent presidential and legislative elections, we first evaluate the impact of each of these three system types on legislative turnout in a multivariate framework. We find that the first two regime types have higher turnout figures than the third regime type. In a second step, we examine whether citizens participation in any of the three system types interacts with the electoral formula in their country. Our results indicate that proportional representation has a moderate positive impact on turnout in presidential systems with non-concurrent presidential and legislative elections, a negative impact in presidential systems with concurrent legislative elections to the states two highest offices and no impact in parliamentary systems.