Abstract
With the attention of scholars already drawn to the decline in voter turnout in new democracies after the first wave of open/competitive elections, by relying on aggregate data studies have provided explanations for cross-national variations in turnout. Yet, the reliance on aggregate data makes it hard to establish what had lead individuals to abstain from the political process. Thus, in this chapter, by using individual-level analysis from the European Social Survey and the Afrobarometer we re-interrogate the determinants of non-voting in two new democracies of post-Communist Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Having tested the various explanations for non-voting, first, our results show some consistency across the two regions, suggesting non-voters are those who lack any form of psychological engagement with politics, who are isolated from the recruitment networks and live in urban areas. Second, our result tends to be contradictory, in which while in post-Communist Europe non-voters are men and those with lower level of education in sub-Saharan Africa they are women and those with higher level of education. Third, pertaining to country level indicators, apart from the fact non-voters in both regions are those who have no trust in elections and who lived in countries with disproportional electoral systems, the results tend to be varied.
Highlights
The first wave of open and competitive elections in a number of new democracies, most especially those in post-Communist Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, was marked by high rates of voter turnout, in recent decades, the attention of scholars has been drawn to the decline of voter turnout in both regions
Considering our main objective is to evaluate the genuine effects of the variables at different levels and using different models, we began by breaking down citizens’ propensity for non-voting along the lines of each of our key theoretical perspectives by building very parsimonious models step-by-step, before rounding up by pulling all the variables from each of the four theoretical perspective into an expanded logit model that incorporates the effect of individual- and country-level variables
We began by modelling the effect of individual resource variables on the probability of non-voting in post-communist Europe and sub-Saharan African countries, with the results revealing the following
Summary
The first wave of open and competitive elections in a number of new democracies, most especially those in post-Communist Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, was marked by high rates of voter turnout, in recent decades, the attention of scholars has been drawn to the decline of voter turnout in both regions. In the section that follows, we begin by explaining why it is important to study non-voting in the context of new democracies, followed by establishing trends in voter turnout (i.e. by comparing the turnout data from the first elections and most recent elections across both regions), a theoretical review of determinants of voting to deduce explanations for non-voting. We proceed with a discussion of the research design, present our results, while concluding remarks round off the empirical findings
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