Electoral Competitiveness and Turnout in British Elections, 1964–2010

Abstract

Analyzing the British Election Study from 1964 to 2010, we examine the influence of electoral context on turnout, focusing on the closeness of elections in terms of lagged seat and constituency-level winning margins. Using cross-classified multilevel models to account for individual and contextual factors and disentangle life cycle, cohort- and election-specific effects, we find that closeness strongly affects voting behavior, particularly among new electors. Widening seat margins in British elections over the last decades have had a persistent impact on turnout. Respondents who faced less competitive environments when young are more likely to abstain in subsequent elections than those reaching voting age after close-fought races. We conclude that variations in competitiveness have had both short- and long-term effects on turnout.

Forecasting National Turnout at British General Elections: Combining Polls and Structural Models

“…It is one of the more consistent findings in the literature that the closeness of an election, often measured as the distance in vote shares between the first and the runner-up party, boosts turnout (see Blais, 2000, for an extensive overview). It is a straightforward prediction of rational choice theory that people face higher incentives to vote when the outcome of an election is close, and this is indeed what others have found at the national (e.g., Pattie and Johnston, 2001;Clarke et al, 2006), the constituency (Denver and Hands, 1974;Franklin, 2004;Loewen and Blais, 2006), and the individual level (Vowles, Katz and Stevens, 2017), although the effects tend to be fairly small. 5 It is not entirely clear a priori whether voters use knowledge from the previous election or take current polls into consideration to anticipate the closeness in the current election.…”

Policy-based Abstention: An Application to Brazil’s 2002 Presidential Election

“…The alienation and indifference thresholds in equations (3) and (5) are modelled as functions of socioeconomic, attitudinal, political and protest variables that have figure prominently in the voter turnout literature (e.g., Franklin, 2004;Vowles, Katz & Stevens, 2017). The socioeconomic variables included in the model are: Age; Gender, a dichotomous variable coded 1 for male and 0 for female; and Education, coded on an eight point-scale ranging from no education to completed university degree.…”

Mandates matter: how decisive victories enhance expectations about government performance

“…Scholars have long established that the competitiveness of elections affects citizens' political behaviours and attitudes. Closer races are associated with higher turnout levels (Vowles, Katz, and Stevens 2017), better informed voters (Altheas, Cizmar, and Gimpel 2009), heightened media attention (Banducci and Hanretty 2014) and higher (perceived) electoral legitimacy (Birch 2008).…”

“…Ferejohn (1986), for instance, argues that incumbents have incentives to implement the policies preferred by the electorate because of their fear of being replaced in the next election. To the extent that close elections provide a signal about the competitiveness of future races and induce greater uncertainty about officeholders' re-election prospects, narrow electoral victories should encourage incumbents to enact the policies that got them into office and by which they will be retrospectively rewarded or punished (Hobolt and Klemmensen 2008;Vowles, Katz, and Stevens 2017). The threat of removal becomes less credible following less competitive elections yielding larger majorities for the winner, who may feel relatively safe from electoral punishment and thus less pressured to enact the policies promised to the citizenry.…”