Decline In Turnout Research Articles

Socioeconomic marginalization and political preferences: evidence from Palestinian Arabs in Israel

AbstractWe examine the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics and voting patterns among Arabs in Israel. We combine panel data on sixty-three Arab localities with election results and socioeconomic indicators for seven election years between 1996 and 2015. Exploiting the variation in political preferences and socioeconomic status across localities and over time, we find that the trends in Arab turnout are consistent with the substantive representation and political exclusion theories: that is, the representation of Arabs in Jewish-majority parties contributed to turnout, while the events of the second Intifada, which included clashes between Arabs in Israel and the Israeli police, were associated with a long-term decline in turnout. We also found that the preference for Arab parties over Left-wing Zionist parties is related to the instrumental voting theory. As the socioeconomic status of Arabs in Israel improved, they were less dependent on Jewish-majority parties for public goods provision and thus had less reason to support them. These findings contribute to understanding the experience of minorities in other contexts and to policymakers in Israel and beyond.

Time to death explains the chronological decline of voter turnout among the older population

Age is possibly the strongest known individual-level socio-demographic determinant of participation in elections. Despite its substantial influence in shaping electoral outcomes, evidence-based understanding of the steep decline in turnout at older ages is scarce. We suggest that time-related proximity to death and the associated decline in cognitive and physical functioning may explain this relationship. With full population data on the participation of the 65+ year-old electorate in the 1999 parliamentary elections in Finland linked to a more than 21-year mortality follow-up, we demonstrate that the remaining lifetime is a more powerful predictor of voting than age, often by an order of magnitude. These results offer a novel theoretical principle into understanding the fundamental age-related decline in electoral participation at older ages: It is not the time from the cradle, but the time to the grave, that counts more.

Coattail effects and turnout: Evidence from a quasi-experiment

All over the world, a very large number of elections take place concurrently with other elections for representatives in different government tiers. A crucial question for understanding electoral outcomes in those elections is the existence of electoral spillovers or coattail effects. Causal identification of coattail effects is challenging because popularity shocks typically affect parties in both concurrent elections. This paper exploits a quasi-experiment—the ban of a party in only one of the concurrent elections—to estimate coattail effects. The results show that a 1 pp decline in electoral support for a party in a given election reduces its support in the concurrent election by 0.25 pp. This comes along with a decline in turnout of the same size in both elections.

Civil Rights and Civic Participation of Youth in Latvia

The path to the modern democratic model has been lengthy and contentious, culminating in the recognition of civil rights as guarantees of equal social opportunity and legal protection for all, irrespective of race, religion or other personal characteristics. Realising civil rights requires the active engagement of all societal members, including the youth, who are especially vital for the future. This article aims to elucidate the legal avenues for youth civic participation in Latvia, assess the current situation and provide insights into the historical evolution of civil rights. To achieve this, we examined the existing legal framework, analysed theoretical literature, gathered statistical data, drew conclusions and reviewed recent research on youth civic participation. While laws regulate the opportunities for youth in Latvia to engage in civic activities, they do not resolve participation issues. Data from the Saeima (the Parliament of Latvia) elections between 2002 and 2018 reveal a nearly 17% decline in voter turnout, with youth participation even lower. This reluctance to vote or run for office reflects a broader political distrust in society. Additionally, the lack of consistent civic education further undermines young people’s willingness to engage in civic activities. Keywords: civil rights; civic participation; democracy; engagement.

Labor market dualization or cultural divide?: A comparative analysis of the declining support for center-left parties in Western Europe and Japan

Center-left parties in Western Europe and Japan have experienced a persistent decline in voter turnout. This study examines the factors contributing to this weakening support. Using data from the 2016 European Social Survey across 13 countries and the 2017–2018 Japanese General Social Surveys, we tested three hypotheses: labor market dualization between insiders and outsiders; divergence in policy preferences between social investment and social compensation; and a cultural divide between liberalism and authoritarianism. Our findings provide little support for the labor market dualization and policy preference divergence hypotheses in both Western Europe and Japan. The third hypothesis, concerning a cultural divide in attitudes toward immigration, is supported only in Western Europe. Conversely, Japan is an anomaly because of the absence of a substantial left-liberal constituency. The scarcity of liberal values among Japan's sociocultural professionals suggests that center-left parties have underdeveloped core constituencies.

The Transformation of Arab Politics and Arab Voter Behavior in Israeli Elections (1999-2009)

This article delves into the transformative decade between 1999 and 2009, exploring the intricate web of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the consequential impact of Jewish-Arab tensions on Arab politics and Arab voter behavior in Israeli elections. During this decade, internal factors, such as generational shift, leadership changes, and political pluralism, played a pivotal role in reshaping the societal landscape in the Arab sector. On the other hand, external factors, including the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation process and the eruption of the Second Intifada, intensified the predicament of Israeli citizens of Arab origin, amplifying their national identity dilemma. The primary objective of this study is to analyze voting patterns within the Arab sector during the elections of 1999, 2001, 2003, 2006, and 2009, thereby highlighting the profound political implications of the Jewish-Arab tensions on Arab political engagement and voting behaviors. By doing so, this research provides insights into the changing patterns of Arab votes and their impact on the broader political landscape of Israel. The findings reveal that the growing social marginalization and disconnection from the Jewish sector significantly influenced the Arab sector's electoral participation. This period witnessed a decline in Arab voter turnout and a shift in support from left-wing Jewish-Zionist parties to Arab parties, paradoxically contributing to the electoral performances of both Arab parties and right-wing Jewish-Zionist parties.

The heterogeneous effects of internet voting

A decline in voter turnout over the last decades has prompted governments to introduce technological innovations for voting. This paper studies the heterogeneous effects of internet voting on voter turnout and vote shares in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Exploiting across-time and across-municipalities variations during the introduction of internet voting between 2006 and 2013, we find that internet voting increased the turnout of individuals aged 80 and above, particularly of male voters, but did not have any effects on younger individuals. As a result, the vote share of adults aged 80+ relatively increased following the introduction of internet voting. Overall, our study shows that although internet voting does not appear to have an effect on general turnout, it has reweighted the political power of some sociodemographic groups, giving more weight to males and older adults.

CouncilMARK™ Revisited: measuring the effectiveness of New Zealand’s local government once more

This article reviews the results of the second tranche of assessments for CouncilMARK™ , Local Government New Zealand’s voluntary quality enhancement programme. Those councils that were reassessed generally showed either a modest improvement or no change in the four priority areas assessed (governance, financial decision making, service delivery and communication). The business and corporate focus of CouncilMARK means that it yields scores that diverge markedly from those obtained by the New Zealand Local Government Survey, which focuses on public and business perceptions of council activities. The implementation of CouncilMARK has not arrested the decline of voter turnout in local body elections. Moreover, there have been no changes to either the programme’s priority areas or its procedures that recognise recent local and international research which consistently advocates a more people-focused approach to the activities of local government.

“Voting with feet”: Russian electoral sociology on the problem of voter turnout (1989–1996)

The article is devoted to the problem of turnout in elections in the USSR and Russia in the period from 1989 to 1996 in the assessment of Russian sociologists and social scientists. The theory of representative democracy in its neoliberal version narrows the acts of legitimation to the voting procedure. The experience of implementing these principles in the USSR and the Russian Federation at the end of the 20th century is quite relevant for the development of contemporary political sociology. The goal is a retrospective (historical) study of the explanatory schemes offered by Russian electoral sociologists and representatives of related disciplines on the decline in voter turnout in the 1989–1996 elections. Objectives: 1) description of specific situations, 2) analysis of the positions and arguments put forward, 3) generalization of the hypotheses and concepts proposed. Traditional methods for works of this nature were used (analysis, synthesis, heuristic, descriptive). The decline in the number of voters was constant. As in the rest of the world, it primarily affected those structures that were not perceived as significant. This led to a gradual lowering of the electoral barrier, even to its abolition. The statement about “voting with one’s feet” as a result of disappointment in the socio-economic transformations of the 1990s became a common place in the sociologists’ reasoning. The active part of the electorate, affiliated with certain political forces and organizations, reacted sensitively to mass media reports of falsifications. The general decline in voter turnout was perfectly exploited by political technologists for the benefit of their clients. The first steps of the Russian electoral sociology were not able to improve the situation in the socio-political orientation of the electorate.

Is compulsory voting a solution to low and declining turnout? Cross-national evidence since 1945

AbstractDespite the substantial body of research on compulsory voting's (CV) relationship with turnout, much remains unknown about the role of different types of CV rules, their enforcement, and their ability to prevent the secular turnout decline observed around the world. Moreover, existing studies that leverage changes to CV laws are limited to a single country. We assemble rich new data on voter turnout and electoral legislation that, we believe, include the most accurate and extensive cross-national measure of CV to date. We test three theoretically derived hypotheses: that CV enforcement matters for participation; that enforcement's effect is conditioned by state capacity; and that, only when CV is enforced, will it mitigate voter turnout's post-1970 tendency to decline. We find support for each. We also find that the nature of sanctions for non-voting is irrelevant for participation.

Spoils of War: The Political Legacy of the German hyperinflation

I study the link between monetary policy and electoral outcomes by linking new data on the 1923 German hyperinflation and the vote share of the main parties of Weimar Republic from 1924 to 1933. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in prices in over 280 cities, I find that inflation predicts the vote share of the Volksrechtspartei, an association-turned-party of inflation victims, and positively correlates with the Communists in the 1932 elections. Hyperinflation also leads to a decline in turnout, with a loss of confidence in the German institutions. However, contrary to received wisdom, areas more affected by inflation did not see a higher vote share for the Nazi party. Results are robust to a range of specifications, including models in differences, panel data with fixed effects, Coarsened Exact Matching estimation, Conley standard errors, and an instrumental variable strategy.

Pilkada in the Midst of Pandemic: A Case Study of Decreasing the level Community Political Participation in Sleman Regency Pilkada 2020

Since the March 2020 Pandemic that hit Indonesia, this condition has greatly impacted various aspects of life. Not only economic and social, but also in the political field, including the process of implementing democracy through the 2020 simultaneous regional elections. One of the regions that will hold the December 2020 elections is Sleman Regency. Political participation in the 2020 Pilkada in Sleman has decreased compared to political participation in the 2019 election. In the 2020 Pilkada it only reached 75.82%, while in the 2019 Election it could reach 87.7%. PAN. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is one of the main factors causing the decline in voter turnout. This study aims to determine the factors that influence the decrease in the level of community participation in the 2020 Pilkada during the pandemic condition in Sleman Regency. This research uses a qualitative approach with a literature study method. The results of this study indicate that the decline in the level of community participation in the 2020 Pilkada in Sleman Regency is influenced by several factors, among others, the first is the Covid-19 pandemic condition where not all residents registered in the DPT can participate in voting due to constraints on domicile outside the region with PPKM rules that apply. enforced by the government. Second, there is insufficient information and socialization related to the Pilkada and health protocols for preventing Covid-19 that were enforced during the Pilkada

The 2021 municipal elections: rise of the volatile voter or disaffected citizen?

ABSTRACT South Africa's 2021 municipal elections present something of a paradox. The results suggested a highly competitive environment, especially in the urban metropoles, with an unprecedented number of hung councils where no single party was able secure 51 percent. The larger parties suffered losses while smaller parties made gains, suggesting voters had abandoned old political homes for new ones. In contrast, while previous local elections enjoyed modest but steady increases in participation, the 2021 municipal elections also witnessed a sharp decline in voter turnout. Less than a third of eligible voters participated. This paper argues that these paradoxical features are likely to remain a feature of South African electoral politics in the medium-term. While many who participated were likely to be volatile voters, switching their votes to a party different from previous choices, their participation was insufficient to compensate for a higher numbers of abstentions, which are a result of growing political system disaffection with electoral actors. These disaffected citizens are positioned at the periphery of politics and will be difficult to entice back to the polls, leaving the competitive aspect of South Africa's elections reliant on a diminishing number of engaged and unpredictable voters.

Descriptive over-representation, cliental accountability, and minority politics: the case of the Druze in Israel

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between descriptive representation, patrimonial voting, turnout, and voting patterns in small ethnic groups. It argues that the combination between patrimonial voting and descriptive representation marginalizes the importance of substantive representation, leading to a decline in turnout, but simultaneously to cliental loyalty networks among voters that shape voting preferences. It utilizes the case of the Druze in Israel and analyzes their voting patterns in order to establish the argument that the mechanism that leads to party preferences among minority voters, namely, clientalistic accountability, is the same mechanism that renders descriptive over-representation devoid of substantive impact on state policies directed towards the minority. Our aim is to enrich the literature on the affinity between minority descriptive representation, patrimonial voting, clientalist accountability, and political efficacy. We demonstrate that Druze candidates in Zionist parties, especially those close to decision-making circles by being part of the governmental coalition, establish a broad network of supporters based on family ties, personally benefiting voters by integrating them or their relatives into high-income jobs, making their cliental preferences rational. This creates the gap between mere descriptive representation of minority groups and the substantial representation of their communal interests in “patronage democracy.”

Voter Turnout Decline and Party Responsiveness

AbstractNumerous studies conclude that declining turnout is harmful for democracy. However, we uncover the arguably positive effect that political parties become more responsive to the median voter in the election after turnout has decreased. We assume that parties are vote seeking and show that moderate voters are responsible for changes in turnout, and we argue that declining turnout in an election sends a clear signal to political parties that there is an opportunity to mobilize disaffected voters in the following election by responding to changes in public opinion. We report the results of statistical analyses on data from thirteen democracies from 1977 to 2018 that provide evidence that declining voter turnout in one inter-election period is associated with increasing party responsiveness to public opinion in the following period. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of voter turnout, political representation, and parties' election strategies.

The impact of turnout on partisan bias in U.S. House elections, 1972–2018*

AbstractObjectivePartisan bias occurs when votes are distributed across districts in such a way that even if the vote between two parties were equal, one party would win more seats than the other. Gerrymandering is a well‐established cause of partisan bias, but it is not the only one. In this article, we ask whether the decline of voter turnout can also influence partisan bias.MethodsWe modified the Gelman–King partisan symmetry measure to make it sensitive to turnout differences across U.S. House elections from 1972 to 2018.ResultsWe found that turnout variation has caused partisan bias in U.S. House elections in the Democratic Party's favor since at least 1972, though turnout bias has gotten weaker in recent elections.ConclusionWhile turnout bias can buffer the impact of turnout reductions, it has the potential to dramatically increase the number of seats a party loses when its supporters fail to vote.

The Generational and Institutional Sources of the Global Decline in Voter Turnout

ABSTRACTWhy has voter turnout declined in democracies all over the world? This article draws on findings from microlevel studies and theorizes two explanations: generational change and a rise in the number of elective institutions. The empirical section tests these hypotheses along with other explanations proposed in the literature—shifts in party/candidate competition, voting-age reform, weakening group mobilization, income inequality, and economic globalization. The authors conduct two analyses. The first analysis employs an original data set covering all post-1945 democratic national elections. The second studies individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and British, Canadian, and US national election studies. The results strongly support the generational change and elective institutions hypotheses, which account for most of the decline in voter turnout. These findings have important implications for a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy and the challenges it faces.

Voter Turnout in Portugal: A Geographical Perspective

The decline of voter turnout in Portugal was confirmed in the legislative election of 2015. The unquestionable democratic value associated with the act of voting, leads to the discussion of this issue, and emphasizes the need for additional investigation. Particularly, it is crucial to identify the characteristics of citizens who vote, to better understand the phenomenon and think about solutions. This work identified the most significant sociodemographic variables in explaining voter turnout in continental Portugal and described the relationship between those variables and voter turnout, including the geographical variation existing across the municipalities. A Semiparametric Geographically Weighted Regression (SGWR) model enabled the investigation of local variations in turnout values, simultaneously considering that its relationship with some variables might vary over space. Results show that turnout is influenced by a set of sociodemographic variables. While some variables affect turnout differently over the country (percentage of family cores with children aged less than 15, and percentage of owner-occupied houses), others affect it uniformly (percentage of graduated residents, percentage of classic families, and distance to Lisbon or Oporto – the nearest). These results suggest the use of a semiparametric approach to better understand turnout and for further research on voting issues.

Communicating with patients and the public about COVID-19 vaccine safety: recommendations from the Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation.

Communicating with patients and the public about COVID-19 vaccine safety: recommendations from the Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation.

Electoral Behavior of Voters in Ukraine in Crisis Times

The article contains an analysis of the impact of the crisis situation on the electoral behavior during the national elections in Ukraine. For this purpose, the study highlights the pre-crisis, crisis and postcrisis periods. The criteria for a comparative analysis of the electoral behaviour during these periods are the peculiarities of territorial differentiation of voting and the degree of support for election participants, as well as the specifics of the turnout in the regions of Ukraine. It has been revealed that with the transition from one period to another there has been a transformation of the electoral behaviour of voters. The pre-crisis period was characterized by a significant electoral split in Ukraine between pro-Russian and pro-Western forces. The sharp decline in voter turnout in the South-East of the country during the crisis period led to a significant fall in the influence of the pro-Russian forces. In the western regions of Ukraine, on the contrary, during this period there was an increase in voter activity, which determined the emergence of new relevant political forces of a pro-Western nature. In the post-crisis period, turnout rates generally returned to pre-crisis levels. However, this did not lead to a full restoration of the electoral division of the country due to the geographically homogeneous support of V.A. Zelensky and his party «Servant of the People». A forecast is made, including three scenarios of transformation of the political system of Ukraine taking into account possible changes in the electoral behavior of voters.