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

Highlights

• We expand the meta-analysis of Geys (2006) with 102 articles to cover 185 articles.

• We broadly confirm the original findings in our more diverse pool of studies.

• We extend the analysis to a comparative study of national vs. subnational elections.

• The explanatory power of distinct covariates is found to vary across types of elections.

• Future work should attend more closely to the territorial scope of the election.

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.

Introduction

Elections are central to democratic polities (Ashworth, 2012, Geys and Mause, 2016), and scholars have long sought to identify and explain variation in electoral participation across time and space. Indeed, few topics in political science have generated a comparable volume of literature, and turnout scholarship witnessed a veritable explosion over the past 15 years. A search for ‘voter turnout’ in Thomson Reuters' Web of Science database, for instance, shows that the absolute number of turnout articles has followed a sharply upward trend since 2000 (see Fig. 1). The number of articles on voter turnout published in 2014 (i.e. 197) is nearly four times the number of articles published in 2000 (i.e. 50). This is not just because more studies are being published in general. An identical query in JSTOR reveals a similar upward trend in the relative proportion of articles dealing with voter turnout within the overall number of articles indexed in its corpus in a given year (i.e. from 0.002 in 2000 to 0.006 in 2012; see Fig. 1).

Clearly, effective accumulation of knowledge stems not only from conducting original studies, but also from taking stock of what we have learnt so far. In addition to literature reviews following a conventional state-of-the-art model (Blais, 2006), two meta-analytic assessments of the determinants of voter turnout were published in recent years. Geys (2006) reviews 83 aggregate-level studies published between 1968 and 2004, while Smets and van Ham (2013) analyse the findings of 90 individual-level studies published between 2000 and 2010. In light of the rapid expansion of the voter turnout literature documented in Fig. 1, this article aims to further develop our knowledge on why people vote by extending the aggregate-level meta-analysis conducted by Geys (2006) in two ways. First, we supplement the 83 studies featured in the original analysis with 102 additional studies published since 2002. This expanded and more diverse pool of literature allows us to increase the validity and generalizability of the meta-analysis, and thereby our confidence in the inferences drawn.

Second, we exploit the larger sample of studies to assess whether, and to what extent, the same set of determinants can explain voter turnout in elections at different levels of government. To the best of our knowledge, no such direct comparison currently exists. In fact, theoretical arguments and explanatory variables in most studies appear to be brought forward without specific attention to the level of government under analysis. Studies of political participation thus generally appear to follow an a-territorial approach in which local or regional politics is effectively viewed as a mere generalization of what goes on at the national level (Baybeck, 2014). As a result, the determinants of political engagement – both at the individual and aggregate level – are implicitly assumed not to differ across territorial levels.

Nevertheless, this view can be contested from a theoretical as well as empirical perspective. For instance, Sellers et al. (2013, p. 8) draw on the tradition of political geography to argue that voters are embedded in places defined by specific ‘collective dynamics of communities and social mobilisation’, which can foster turnout in some types of elections but not others. One recent illustration of this effect is provided in Andersen et al. (2014, p. 157, italics added), who offer strong evidence that ‘higher stakes at the local level increase participation at the local relative to the regional election’. Furthermore, from an empirical point of view, relevant discrepancies clearly exist in the levels of engagement between national and local politics. This is reflected in, for instance, significant variation in voter turnout for elections at different levels of government within the same jurisdiction (Andersen et al., 2014, Horiuchi, 2005, Morlan, 1984, Sørensen, 2015). As such, we cannot simply assume a general equivalence of turnout determinants irrespective of the type of election. By separately analysing studies on voter turnout in national versus subnational elections, we assess the different processes that might conceivably play at distinct levels of government.