Explaining voter turnout: A meta-analysis of national and subnational elections

Abstract

Research about voter turnout has expanded rapidly in recent years. This article takes stock of this development by extending the meta-analysis of Geys (2006) in two main ways. First, we add 102 studies published between 2002 and 2015 to the initial sample of 83 studies. Overall, we document only minor changes to the original inferences. Second, since different processes might conceivably play at different levels of government, we exploit the larger sample to separately analyse the determinants of voter turnout in national versus subnational elections. We find that campaign expenditures, election closeness and registration requirements have more explanatory power in national elections, whereas population size and composition, concurrent elections, and the electoral system play a more important role for explaining turnout in subnational elections.

Análisis de datos de panel en ciencia política: ventajas y aplicaciones en estudios electorales

“…El estudio de la participación electoral se ha convertido en un tema clásico de la ciencia política, y acumula una vasta cantidad de trabajos (Cancela y Geys, 2016;Geys, 2006;Smets y van Ham, 2013;Stockemer, 2017). Gran parte de ellos se basa en la comparación de los porcentajes de asistencia a las urnas entre varios países o unidades subnacionales en el tiempo, con lo que forma así paneles de elecciones (Cancela y Geys recogen 185 estudios; Stockemer 130).…”

Elite behaviour and citizen mobilisation

“…Compulsory voting has been shown to affect turnout in a number of studies, and could also influence election outcomes, and hence associated tax and regulation policies which could affect investor decisions. The review of Cancela and Geys (2016) also stresses a positive effect of election closeness and a negative one of population size, in addition to effects of the basic features of the electoral system. This is in contrast to other basic aspects of the political system in our sample, such as whether a country has a parliamentary or presidential system, which does not vary over time for the sample for which we find robust results (i.e., democratic states).…”

Merging County Administrations – Cross-National Evidence of Fiscal and Political Effects

“…Second, voter turnout may decrease because election incentives decrease. Studies consistently show that voter turnout decrease in constituency size because the probability to be the pivotal voter decrease (for surveys see Cancela andGeys 2016, van Houwelingen 2017). Third, larger counties may crowd out non-partisan candidates that cannot rely on party organizations, which are required to keep in touch with local problems in unwieldy large jurisdictions (Fritz und Feld 2015).…”