Turnout Across Democracies

World democracies widely differ in legislative, executive, and legal institutions. Different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power. We explore how these mappings affect voters' participation in an election. We show that the eff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2016-07, Vol.60 (3), p.607-624
Main Authors: Herrera, Helios, Morelli, Massimo, Nunnari, Salvatore
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Competition
Contests
Cost allocation
Democracy
Election results
Elections
Electoral College
Electoral rules
Ethics
Marginal costs
Mobilization
Modeling
Participation
Political parties
Political power
Power
Power-sharing
Voter behavior
Voter turnout
Voters
Voting
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Summary:World democracies widely differ in legislative, executive, and legal institutions. Different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power. We explore how these mappings affect voters' participation in an election. We show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences. We uncover a novel contest effect: Given the preferences distribution, turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional power-sharing system; turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of power sharing. Moreover, we generalize the competition effect, common to models of endogenous turnout: Given the institutional environment, turnout increases in the ex ante preferences evenness, and more so when the overall system has lower power sharing. These results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches, including ethical voter models, voter mobilization models, and rational voter models.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12215