Voter Turnout in Africa's Multiparty Regimes

Abstract

Many people consider voting the most important form of political participation in a democracy. To this point, no aggregate-level, cross-national studies have been done on the factors that affect voter turnout in Africa. This article seeks to fill the gap in the literature by examining the factors that influence voter turnout in sub-Saharan Africa's multiparty regimes that have had two consecutive elections since the democratic transitions in the 1990s. Many of the central findings of the research on voter turnout in other regions reappear in the examination of voter turnout in Africa. The authors find that two institutional variables—type of electoral formula and concurrency of presidential and legislative elections— have significant effects on electoral turnout. Media exposure has a significant positive relationship with voter turnout. The number of elections a polity has had also appears to affect levels of voter turnout.