Voters Who Abstain: Explaining Abstention and Ballot Roll-Off in the 2014 Toronto Municipal Election

Abstract

This article explores the correlates of ballot roll-off in the 2014 Toronto municipal election. While turnout in the mayoral contest was comparatively high, roughly 4.3% of voters abstained from council races. Using data from the Toronto Election Study, a large- N survey of electors conducted around the time of the 2014 Toronto Election, this study identifies a series of factors related to roll-off from mayoral to council elections. These variables include a number of sociodemographic characteristics and attitudinal factors commonly associated with turnout, measures of attachment to the city, and a series of election-specific factors. Results reveal that many factors commonly associated with abstention similarly drive roll-off, but that the experiences of individual voters also have an impact upon roll-off rates.

Who Has School Spirit? Explaining Voter Participation in School Board Elections

“…In keeping with our discussion above, we focus on three sets of independent variables when identifying the correlates of school board turnout: sociodemographic characteristics, partisan and ideology variables, and parental status (including both having a child and having a child in public school). To account for the fact that turnout in general has been consistently linked to the closeness of a race (Cancela and Geys, 2016) and that roll-off rates are thought to decrease as the competitiveness of down-ballot races increases (McGregor, 2018), we also include a measure of competitiveness of school board races. This variable is based upon the margin of victory in each school board district, comparing the winning candidate to the second-place finisher.…”

“…Thus far, there has been only one individual-level examination of ballot roll-off conducted in Canada (McGregor, 2018), and to our knowledge, no studies of turnout in Canadian school board elections have ever been undertaken. Research on this topic is important not only because participation in school board elections—and the policy consequences of such participation—is a topic of academic debate but also because it will allow us to better understand the factors that shape turnout when institutional and sociodemographic contextual factors are shared across two concurrent elections.…”

“…Since we have little research to guide us on this specific topic, we draw on the broader literature of down-ballot elections and roll-off. Research on Canadian municipal roll-off indicates that demographic variables, including age, income and ethnicity, play a role in voters’ decisions to participate in down-ballot council races (McGregor, 2018), and we therefore begin by exploring the sociodemographic factors that may be linked to school board turnout. These include the variables in McGregor's analysis listed above, along with two others: university education, which is connected to turnout in general (Geys, 2006) and may be particularly important for participation in elections directly related to education; and gender, on the assumption that potentially higher levels of women's participation in school board politics (Tolley, 2011) may also be reflected in higher participation in elections.…”

Selective Abstention in Simultaneous Elections: Understanding the Turnout Gap

“…Answering these questions is not straightforward. Voter turnout scholars have explored the connection between various individual-level characteristics and selective abstention building on both aggregate and/or survey data (Augenblick and Nicholson 2015;Bullock and Dunn 1996;McGregor 2018;Wattenberg, McAllister, and Salvanto 2000). However, inferences from aggregate data are subject to the well-understood ecological inference problem.…”

Selective Abstention in Simultaneous Elections: Understanding the Turnout Gap

“…Answering these questions is not straightforward. Voter turnout scholars have explored the connection between various individual-level characteristics and selective abstention building on both aggregate and/or survey data (Bullock and Dunn 1996;McGregor 2018;Wattenberg, McAllister, and Salvanto 2000). However, inferences from aggregate data are subject to the well-understood ecological inference problem.…”