The impact of turnout on electoral choices: an econometric analysis of the French case (original) (raw)
Related papers
French Politics, 2005
The purpose of this paper is to assess the importance of the electoral campaigns for explaining turnout, and more precisely to evaluate the influence of electoral expenditures and of the multiplication of the candidates. The study of these two determinants also purposes to control for the influence of the structural determinants of the vote, notably the socio-economic variables, as well as for the influence of the voter partisan preferences, whose impact on turnout is rarely taken into account. After a theoretical analysis of the determinants of electoral abstention, we propose an empirical analysis of the participation at the legislative district level for the French elections of 1997.
Electoral Turnout in West-European Democracies
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science …, 2002
This paper investigates voting participation in three countries in Western Europe -Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway -from the 1960s to the late 1990s. Results show that there is no general trend of decline in turnout. However, aggregate turnout figures show somewhat lower levels in more recent elections. Turning to the individual level, the influence of demographic and attitudinal factors is investigated. Political interest show the strongest impact on electoral participation, generation the second largest. Education has effects in the expected direction. These results point to a ""puzzle of electoral participation"": from turnout statistics one would conclude that political interest should have gone down. However, this is not true. This ""puzzle"" points to the fact that context has to be taken into account. This is done here by relating the judgments about political supply of political parties to turnout. Using the classical rational choice notion of alienation and indifference reveals that for example judgments about political offers are related to turnout, also when controlling for educational level. That this relationship is not just subjective but is related to what parties offer in election campaigns is demonstrated by relating programmatic polarization and differentiation to alienation and indifference. The main conclusion to be drawn from our analyses is, that many variables are related to turnout. However, even if they show to have effects consistently over time and across countries it is obvious that their explanatory power altogether is rather weak. This probably has to do with the fact that electoral participation has a low-cost, low benefit nature. Under such circumstances neither an approach concentrating on resources like the SES model nor rational choice considerations can contribute considerably to the explanation of turnout. On the other hand, these variables obviously matter considerably for turnout, given the differences between different socioeconomic groups, or between those being alienated or not. Since the strength of these effects appears to be shaped by the context of an election, it is worthwhile to investigate to which degree the effects of different variables are shaped by the specific context in a given election, be it the closeness of the race, the campaign strategies, the strategic placement of parties and the like.
Public Choice Models of Electoral Turnout: An Experimental Study1
2016
In this paper we present the results of a laboratory experiment which seeks to test four of the most salient economic models of voting behavior: the calculus of voting model, the expressive model, and two models of altruistic voting – pure and warm-glow altruism. While the experimental design is embedded in the rapidly developing literature concerning experiments on electoral behavior, it also displays a number of original elements, being the first design that seeks to simultaneously test predictions derived from the four accounts of voter turnout. The main findings suggest that turnout is mainly driven by the cost of voting and the probability of being decisive. Abstention increases when the cost increases and decreases as the probability of being decisive increases. These results yield slightly higher support for the calculus of voting model, followed by expressive voting, while both models of altruistic voting was found to be the least supported.
Rational Choice Theory and Voter Turnout: Models and Problems of a D Term
Thammasat Review, 19(2), 2016
Turnout studies tackle the question, "Why do some people vote while others do not?" Anthony Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy was the first systematic attempt coping with turnout puzzles by exploiting rational choice theory (RCT). A D term or a civic duty, an important concept used by Downs, explains that people vote only if they care about democracy. There are two important questions regarding voter turnout: (1) Does RCT explain voter turnout successfully? (2) Does adding a D term mean that we no longer have a rational choice model? This paper aims to deal with the latter question only, and my main argument is that a D term makes RCT impossible because while RCT is the conception of investment, the D term is the conception of consumption. I am interested in question (2) only, therefore, even though my answer is that a D term makes RCT impossible, this does not mean that I see that RCT is successful in explaining voter turnout; in contrast, I think it is not. Apart from the discussion of a D term, I also review some RCT models which try to avoid the difficulties raised by a D term. In terms of application, I suggest that different political systems, cultures, history, and so on need different characteristics of RCT, so researchers should be aware of the limits of RCT.
2017
Relying on a qualitative approach based on French opinion poll surveys, this article demonstrate that electoral abstention occurs because voters do not perceive any ideological differences between leading political parties, thus believing that none of them could change any political outcomes and improve their daily lives. And also because voters perceive the political class as powerless and incompetent to improve the social and economic situation (e.g. low economic growth and high unemployment). Then, the crisis of political representation has its roots in a specific voters’ cognitive context where the lack of ideological differentiation of the main political platforms increases voters’ costs of making informed choices.
The dynamics of electoral participation
Comparing democracies, 2002
Participation is the lifeblood of democracy, involving different numbers of people in different activities at different times. Maintaining viable party organizations requires the commitment of a few people over a considerable period. Campaigning, lobbying, or protesting require a greater commitment by more people, but over a shorter period. Voting requires a minimum commitment for a brief period, but involves by far the greatest number of people. In a book primarily about elections it seems natural to focus on voting. Indeed, the health of a democracy is often seen in terms of its level of turnout.
The Factors of the Voting Equation: An Empirical Analysis
The literature on the phenomenon of abstention has shown that participation is determined by certain individual and contextual factors. However, the empirical studies conducted using rational choice theory have not taken these contributions into account. Some authors, more focused on understanding the factors that should be included in the voting equation, have concluded that citizens vote because they overestimate the value of their vote. But is this overestimation random? What does it depend on? The aim of this study, based on the 2008 post-election survey data of the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research (CIS), is to turn the traditional factors of the instrumental voter equation into dependent variables, thereby discovering some of their determinants. The results show that the distribution of these factors is not random and that it does not always match what was predicted.