Suchergebnisse

The number of people choosing to vote or abstain varies over elections and across countries. The reasons why individuals may choose to vote in one election but not the next are not completely known. Election context seems to play a role but there is not a clear set of contextual variables that political scientists employ that capture why turnout - or individual decisions to vote - fluctuates from one election to the next. There remains a need fill this literature gap. This dissertation attempts to move our understanding of turnout variation forward. It does so by analysing three election contexts with cross-national as well as individual-level data for specific countries. The results suggest that factors such as emotional responses to election issues, the economy, the party system, and class voting, have an impact on whether people vote or not. ; El número de personas eligiendo si votar o abtenerse varia entre elecciones a tavés de países. Las razones por la que un individuo pueda decidir votar en unas elecciones, pero no en las siguientes són completamente desconocidas. El contexto de las elecciones parece desempeñar un papel, pero no hay un claro grupo de variables contextuales que politólogos usen que explique porque la participación electoral fluctúe de unas elecciones a las siguientes. Sigue existiendo la necesidad de llenar este vacío en la literatura. Esta tesis doctoral intenta mover la comprensión de la variación de la participación hacia adelante. Mediante el analisis de tres contextos electorales y usando datos de varios paises así como a nivel individual para ciertos países, los resultados sugieren que factores como respuestas emocionales a temas electorales, la economia, el sistema de partidos y el voto de clase, tienen un impacto en si la población votará o no.

Economic voting claims that citizens will reward or punish the incumbent government based on the state of the economy as a mechanism of democratic accountability. In negative economic voting, in order to vote against the government, citizens must have options (parties) in which to place their vote to voice discontent. If not, there is no opportunity to cast an 'economic vote' and abstention results, leading to a weakened economic effect. In this article I argue that the electoral system indirectly mediates the relationship between the economy and the vote by determining the number of viable parties which act as the conduit for punishing the incumbent. Cross-national data and individual-level data for the case of Spain are used to test the impact of the number of parties on economic voting. The findings suggest that when there are more viable parties competing, the probability of casting an economic vote increases.