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We analyse voter turnout using data from 309 local Norwegian language referendums carried out during 1965-2005, emphasising the effect of referendum type and changes in suffrage. The largest determinant of voter participation is suffrage: The contraction of voting rights to parents with children in school leads to an 18 percentage point average increase in turnout, even after controlling for electoral size effects. The data fail to corroborate our prediction that turnout is significantly higher in semi-binding than advisory referendums. The evidence confirms our hypotheses that turnout is negatively correlated with electoral size and positively correlated with electoral competition. [Copyright 2007 Elsevier Ltd.]

With this paper we study the impact of decentralization on turnout. We test the hypotheses that decentralization increases turnout in subnational elections, lowers participation in national elections, and reduces the gap between regional and national arenas. A comparative cross-national analysis does not show any significant effect of decentralization on turnout in national elections. But we take a closer look at two countries, Canada and Spain, where fiscal decentralization has taken place during the past decades. In both countries the empirical evidence suggests that decentralization has contributed to reducing the turnout gap between regional and national elections.

AbstractDespite decades of research, there is no consensus as to the core correlates of national-level voter turnout. We argue that this is, in part, due to the lack of comprehensive, systematic empirical analysis. This paper conducts such an analysis. We identify 44 articles on turnout from 1986 to 2017. These articles include over 127 potential predictors of voter turnout, and we collect data on seventy of these variables. Using extreme bounds analysis, we run over 15 million regressions to determine which of these 70 variables are robustly associated with voter turnout in 579 elections in 80 democracies from 1945 to 2014. Overall, 22 variables are robustly associated with voter turnout, including compulsory voting, concurrent elections, competitive elections, inflation, previous turnout, and economic globalization.

Differences in electoral rules and/or legislative, executive or legal institutions across countries induce different mappings from election outcomes to distributions of power. We explore how these different mappings affect voters' participation in a democracy. Assuming heterogeneity in the cost of voting, the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences for the parties: when the two parties have similar support, turnout is higher in a winner-take-all system than in a power sharing system; the result is reversed when one side has a larger base. Moreover, the winner-take-all system has higher welfare if and only if the support is uneven. We compare the 'size effect' and the 'underdog compensation effect' under different systems. All systems induce an underdog compensation which is partial. Namely, unlike other costly voting models, the side with the larger support almost surely wins the majority of the votes. The results obtained in the rational voter model, characterized by the voter free-riding problem, continue to hold in other models of turnout such as ethical voter models and voter mobilization models.

An analysis of the monotonic decline in turnout for American presidential elections since 1960. Data were obtained from surveys conducted by the Survey Research Center of the Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan. After some common explanations for this decline were examined & rejected, it was discovered that the decline occurred mainly among low-income & low-education whites. Hypotheses that nonvoters abstain because of a desire for an alternative political system were examined, but appropriate data for testing them were unavailable; however, in the 1970s nonvoters were more likely than voters at all income levels to express dissatisfaction with the political system. Nonvoting whites are not always supporters of the Democratic party, & their voting behavior is unpredicatble. Their failure to vote may have an especially significant impact on Democratic party policies, & it implies that palliatives such as reform of voter registration laws may not significantly increase turnout. 4 Tables, 2 Figures. Modified AA.

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed
administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a
ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election
Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically,
reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and
reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important
method for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting by
mail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirements
share this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons,
drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that
early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical
literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent
study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase
in turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statistically
significant—increases in turnout associated with other convenience
voting methods. This work is supported
by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/Brookings
Election Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of Reed
College. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharing
data with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlier
version of this paper. All responsibility for interpretations
lay with the authors.

Writing about local elections in 1968, Charles R. Adrian and Charles Press report that, "It is not known whether … state and national voting-population characteristics fit municipal voting, too." Although a number of important studies of politics and elections in individual communities have emerged in recent years, the data are far from sufficient to permit more than the most speculative generalizations about the nature of the local electorate. This study draws back the curtain, albeit only a bit, on one aspect of local political participation—voting turnout. The data presented constitute, so far as we know, the first attempt at a comprehensive comparison among American cities with respect to turnout. As will be suggested and become obvious, the breadth of the data is not matched by their depth; data were received from only 80 percent of the 729 cities above 25,000 population in 1962, and we were able to utilize comparative turnout figures from only 282 of these. While relationships are suggested between turnout, political and governmental structure, and characteristics of the population, these relationships must be regarded more as leads to future research, than as clear and unambiguous findings.Previous work by the present authors has pointed to the importance of the political and social variables included in this analysis of American cities. Lee suggested in a study of nonpartisan elections and politics in California cities that nonpartisanship might tend to reduce voter participation. In a study of American cities, this hypothesis was confirmed in a preliminary analysis of the same data used in this article.

It is conventional to speak of voting as "habitual." But what does this mean? In psychology, habits are cognitive associations between repeated responses and stable features of the performance context. Thus, "turnout habit" is best measured by an index of repeated behavior and a consistent performance setting. Once habit associations form, the response can be cued even in the absence of supporting beliefs and motivations. Therefore, variables that form part of the standard cognitive-based accounts of turnout should be more weakly related to turnout among those with a strong habit. We draw evidence from a large array of ANES surveys to test these hypotheses and find strong support. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we consider the relationship between voter turnout and voter evaluations of the candidates. Using thermometer data and the 1976 voter validation study, we investigate the magnitude of indifference, alienation, and satisfaction effects. Overall, we find candidate-based abstention in 1976 to be minimal, suggesting that nonvoting in American presidential elections must be understood in terms of factors unrelated to parties' choices of nominees.

This paper analyzes the effect of registration deadlines on voter turnout. The theoretical explanation considers how registration deadlines affect turnout when individuals influence the participation of others. The theoretical model leads to a novel empirical hypothesis, that deadlines can have both a direct and indirect effect on turnout through a behavioral contagion process. The paper reports empirical findings that confirm the theoretical expectations. These results have important implications for future research on registration deadlines and Election Day registration as the effects of these reforms depend on the specific social context in which they are adopted. Adapted from the source document.

Is the decline in voter turnout an indicator of a worse health of a representative democracy? We build a simple probabilistic-voting model with endogenous turnout to address this question. We find that a lower turnout caused by a higher cost of voting implies higher political rents. Contrarily, a lower turnout caused by a higher ideological mobility of voters or by a lower expressive benefit of voting implies lower political rents. If voters have a civic-duty motive to vote that depends on the level of rents, multiple equilibria (a high-rents low-turnout and a low-rents high-turnout) arise.

Social fractionalisation has been omitted in most influential cross-sectional studies on turnout, and when it has been included, evidence is, at best, mixed. This article addresses this gap from two perspectives. First, using aggregated data from 22 countries we show that turnout is inversely related to ethnolinguistic fractionalisation, even after controlling for institutional, political and socioeconomic determinants. Second, we rely on data from elections in two multilingual territories, Catalonia and Quebec, to examine both the direct and indirect causal mechanisms for which voting and the sense of duty of vote are affected by the individuals' aversion to the opposite ethnicity and the relative size of ethnicities. Analyses show that those relatively more averse to mixing with others who are different to themselves have a lower propensity to vote and are less likely to construe voting as a civic duty when they belong to the minority group.

ObjectivesThe objective of this study is to explore how party systems can affect turnout by exploring the conditional effect of number of parties and party polarization on democracies.MethodsUsing Comparative Manifesto Project data from 26 democracies, this study develops a measure of party systems that interacts party polarization and number of parties to explain turnout.ResultsFindings show that the composition of the party system as a whole is a key determinate of a voter's propensity to vote. Highly polarized systems with few parties spur individuals to vote, while low levels of polarization and many parties reduce incentives to vote.ConclusionsResults have important implications for theories of turnout, resolving the confusion surrounding how party systems affect political participation.