Nichtwähler in Europa, Deutschland und Nordrhein-Westfalen

Kaeding, Michael; Haußner, Stefan; Pieper, Morten

doi:10.1007/978-3-658-11857-0

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There is ample literature on institutional, political, and individual factors affecting turnout (see Cancela and Geys 2016; Stockemer 2017; for Germany: Caballero 2014; Kaeding, Haußner, and Pieper 2016; Steinbrecher 2020). However, we are mainly interested in factors that affect electoral participation disproportionally in different socio-economic groups of potential voters.…”

Section: Reducing Social Stratification Bias In Referendum Participationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing Social Stratification Bias in Referendum Participation: Evidence from the German Local Level

Velimsky,

Vetter,

Bächtiger

2024

Political Research Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Political participation is socially distorted: Socio-economic resources affecting the probability of individuals becoming politically active question the principle of political equality. Such inequality in participation based on social stratification is well documented for elections, while research on inequality in referendum participation is still scarce. Based on the observation that such inequality varies between referendums, this paper explores referendum-specific contextual factors that may affect socially distorted referendum participation. We leverage information from an original dataset covering 1788 districts in 35 German municipalities for 68 local referendums held between 2000 and 2019. The results of our multilevel models indicate that concurrent first-order elections boost referendum turnout and decrease social stratification, while the closeness of the decision increases turnout but does not affect stratification bias. Moreover, we find a curvilinear relationship between turnout and stratification, with stratification only diminishing from participation levels above 40–50%.

show abstract