Political efficacy and the persistence of turnout shocks

Abstract

Understanding whether and under what conditions voter turnout is sticky, that is, whether positive turnout shocks spill over to the next elections, is important both for the evaluation of institutional reforms and to inform about the key assumption in behavioral models of turnout. First, evaluations of institutional reforms have shown that changes in voting costs lead to changes in contemporaneous turnout 1 and that at least the comparative statics of the standard calculus of voting are consistent with

Selective Abstention in Simultaneous Elections: Understanding the Turnout Gap

“…In fact, past selective turnout turns out to be by far the strongest predictor of selective turnout in the current election: voters who selectively abstained in the 2010 elections are 12.6 16.46 percentage points more likely to abstain again four years later. This stickiness in selective abstention resonates with what has been documented in the context of voter turnout decisions (Bechtel, Hangartner, and Schmid 2018;Garmann 2020).…”