Between Order and Disorder: A ‘Weak Law’ on Recent Electoral Behavior among Urban Voters?

Abstract

A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting (Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain, and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution of this entropy (over all elections and countries) appears to be sharply peaked near a common value. This almost common value is typically shared since the 1970s by electorates of the most populated municipalities, and this despite the wide disparities between voting systems and types of elections. Performing different statistical analyses, we notably show that this stylized fact reveals particular correlations between the blank/null votes and abstentionists ratios. We suggest that the existence of this hidden regularity, which we propose to coin as a ‘weak law on recent electoral behavior among urban voters’, reveals an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of urban citizen voting behavior in modern democracies. Analyzing exceptions to the rule provides insights into the conditions under which this normative behavior can be expected to occur.

Election Turnout Statistics in Many Countries: Similarities, Differences, and a Diffusive Field Model for Decision-Making

“…This subject has attracted considerable attention in the recent physics literature, see e.g. [6] – [16] . In [17] , the present authors have studied the statistical regularities of the electoral turnout rates, based on spatially resolved data from 13 French elections since 1992.…”

Universal size effects for populations in group-outcome decision-making problems

“…One possible reason for this, is that unlike τ , p is bounded (p ∈ [0, 1]). Other quantities like the involvement entropy [12] do not show clear quantitative regularities.…”

Entropic Analysis of Votes Expressed in Italian Elections between 1948 and 2018

“…Speaking about direct observations [ 38 ], analysed election turnout in many countries using the Shannon entropy to study the voters’ conformity behaviour. While [ 39 ] have investigated the proportions of abstentions, blank and null voting papers, and valid votes via the Shannon entropy. Their approach is similar to ours, their data is aggregated at the municipality level for 11 countries while we focus on the Italian case only, but differently from [ 39 ] we cover a wider time.…”

“…While [ 39 ] have investigated the proportions of abstentions, blank and null voting papers, and valid votes via the Shannon entropy. Their approach is similar to ours, their data is aggregated at the municipality level for 11 countries while we focus on the Italian case only, but differently from [ 39 ] we cover a wider time. Concluding, in [ 28 ], the authors have studied the relationship between entropies as a measure of citizens dissatisfaction and abstentions in 15 European countries.…”