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Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.
This book explores the consequences of lowering the voting age to 16 from a global perspective, bringing together empirical research from countries where at least some 16-year-olds are able to vote. With the aim to show what really happens when younger people can take part in elections, the authors engage with the key debates on earlier enfranchisement and examine the lead-up to and impact of changes to the voting age in countries across the globe. The book provides the most comprehensive synthesis on this topic, including detailed case studies and broad comparative analyses. It summarizes what can be said about youth political participation and attitudes, and highlights where further research is needed. The findings will be of great interest to researchers working in youth political socialization and engagement, as well as to policymakers, youth workers and activists.
The decline of citizen involvement affects two key elements of democratic government: elections and political parties. Activating the Citizen examines the reasons underlying citizen withdrawal and explores and assesses innovative approaches on both sides of the Atlantic to try to counter these phenomena.
This thesis contains an introduction and four essays that together address the issues of turnout and habitual voting. Although voting is less unequal than other forms of political participation, it is still biased in favour of more socially affluent citizens. One way to achieve more equal participation is to increase the general turnout. This is the implication of the `law of dispersion', formulated by Tingsten in 1937, which states that as turnout increases, participatory equality also increases. In Essay I, co-written with Mikael Persson and Maria Solevid, we revisit Tingsten's law and find new empirical support for it. One possible path to improving general turnout is the formation of voting habits. It is argued by some scholars that voting is a habit formed early on in life, when young people encounter their first elections after coming of age. It is, however, still a matter of debate as to whether voting is an act of habit. Three of the four essays in this thesis tackle this question in various ways. In Essay II, I study voting among young people who encounter their first election in different social contexts depending on their age, and how these differing contexts affect their propensity to vote in their first and second election. In Essay III, I examine whether experiencing a European Parliament election with a low turnout as a first election affects the likelihood of casting a vote in a subsequent national parliamentary election. In Essay IV, co-written with Sven Oskarsson, we study student mock elections, which constitute the first, albeit hypothetical, election experience for many young people. The main result is that the first election a young person faces is not as important as has been claimed in previous research. Regardless of whether the initial experience takes place in a context that encourages turnout or the first election encountered is a low-stimulus election that fails to draw crowds to the polls, there is no substantial impact on turnout in subsequent elections. One implication of this finding is that lowering the voting age is not likely to increase voting rates, not even in the longer term. Den här avhandlingen innefattar ett introduktionskapitel och fyra artiklar som tillsammans behandlar valdeltagande och röstning som en vana. Även om röstning i allmänna val är den mest jämlika formen av politiskt deltagande finns ändå tydliga skillnader i deltagande mellan befolkningsgrupper med olika socioekonomisk bakgrund. Ett sätt att nå ett mer jämlikt deltagande är genom ett högre valdeltagande. Det är innebörden av det lagbundna samband som Tingsten fann år 1937 och som förutsäger att skillnaden i deltagande mellan olika grupper är mindre ju högre valdeltagandet är. I avhandlingens första artikel, samförfattad med Mikael Persson och Maria Solevid, undersöker vi om detta samband fortfarande har empiriskt stöd och finner att så är fallet. En tänkbar väg till ett högre valdeltagande går via ett främjande av vanemässig röstning. En del forskare hävdar nämligen att röstning är en vana och att den vanan formas redan i de första val där en ung person har möjlighet rösta. Huruvida röstning är en vana är dock omdebatterat. Tre av avhandlingens artiklar tar på olika sätt upp den frågan. I avhandlingens andra artikel studerar jag unga personer som beroende på när de är födda får rösta för första gången vid olika åldrar och därmed i skilda social kontexter. Frågan jag ställer är hur dessa skillnader påverkar deras benägenhet att rösta i det valet och i det därpå följande. Vissa unga personer får rösta för första gången efter att ha nått rösträttsåldern i ett Europaparlamentsval där valdeltagandet är lågt. I den tredje artikeln undersöker jag ifall den erfarenheten har någon inverkan på deltagandet i ett därpå följande riksdagsval. I den fjärde artikeln, samförfattad med Sven Oskarsson, studerar vi om de skolval som arrangeras i många skolor har någon inverkan på studenters senare deltagande i riktiga val. Avhandlingens huvudresultat är att deltagande i det första valet en ung person får rösta i saknar den betydelse för framtida valdeltagande som hävdats i tidigare forskning. Oavsett om det första valet äger rum i en kontext som främjar röstning eller om det är ett val som väcker lite intresse, får det ingen substantiell effekt på benägenheten att rösta i följande val. En implikation av detta resultat är att en sänkt rösträttsålder troligen inte skulle ge ett högre valdeltagande, inte ens på längre sikt.
This book focuses on the historical configuration of the territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European nation state. It presents integration as a process of boundary transcendence, redefinition, shift, and change that fundamentally alters the nature of the European states. Its core concern lies in the relationship between the specific institutional design of the new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from its political production, and, finally,the consequences of these two elements on established and developing national European political structures. Integration is examined as a new historical phase in the development of Europe, characterized by a powerful trend toward legal, economic, and cultural de-differentiation after the five-centuryprocess of differentiation that led to the European system of nation states.Considering the EU as the formation of an enlarged territorial system, this work recovers some of the classic issues of political modernization theory: Is the EU an attempt at state formation? Is it an attempt at centre formation without nation building? Is it a process of centre formation without democratization?This work also seeks to sharpen the conceptual tools currently available to deal with processes of territorial enlargement and unification. It develops a theoretical framework for political structuring beyond the nation state, capable of linking all aspects of EU integration (inter-governmentalism, definition of rights, the 'constitutionalization' of treaties, the tensions between the new territorial hierarchy and the nation states, etc.). The book adopts an 'holistic' approach to integration,in the form of a theory from which hypotheses can be generated (even if it is not possible to test all of its components). This theoretical framework has three principal aims: to overcome a rigid distinction between domestic politics and international relations; to link actors' orientations,interests, and motivations with macro outcomes; and to relate structural profiles with dynamic processes of change.
Using a combination of existing and original research, this new text provides a simple explanation for the low turnout in American elections: rather than creating an environment conducive to participation, the institutional arrangements that govern structure participation, representation, and actual governance in the United States create an environment that discourages widespread participation. To explore this argument, the author examines the origins and development of registration laws, single-member districts, such as the Electoral College, and the separation of powers and the impact these institutions have on turnout levels in American national elections. To this end, the text employs a narrative discussing the impact of institutions on turnout in the United States and across nations, supported with extensive yet accessible data analysis. Hill not only provides students with explanations for the low turnout characteristic of American elections, but also demonstrates the powerful impact of institutions on political life.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book investigates the impact of vote buying on the accountability of democratic institutions and policy representation in newly democratic countries, with a focus on Indonesia. In doing so, the book presents a wide-ranging study of the dynamics of vote buying in Indonesia’s young democracy, exploring the nature, extent, determinants, targeting and effectiveness of this practice. It addresses these central issues in the context of comparative studies of vote buying, arguing that although party loyalists are disproportionately targeted in vote buying efforts, in total numbers —given the relatively small number of party loyalists in Indonesia— vote buying hits more uncommitted voters. It also demonstrates that the effectiveness of vote buying on vote choice is in the 10 percent range, which is sufficient for many candidates to secure a seat and thus explains why they still engage in vote buying despite high levels of leakage.
Elections are at the heart of our democracy. Understanding citizens’ decisions to vote or to abstain in elections is crucial, especially when turnout in so many democracies is declining. In The Motivation to Vote, André Blais and Jean-François Daoust provide an original and elegant model that explains why people vote. They argue that the decision to vote or abstain hinges on four factors: political interest, sense of civic duty, perceived importance of the election, and ease of voting. Their findings are strongly supported by empirical evidence from elections in five countries. The authors also test alternative explanations of voter turnout by looking at contextual factors and the role of habit, but find little evidence to support these hypotheses. This analysis is compelling and further demonstrates the power of their model to provide a provocative and parsimonious explanation of voter turnout in elections.
This book demonstrates that the effect of registration laws is not as profound as either reformers would hope or previous studies suggest.
From Kosovo to Kabul, the last decade witnessed growing interest in ?electoral engineering?. Reformers have sought to achieve either greater government accountability through majoritarian arrangements or wider parliamentary diversity through proportional formula. Underlying the normative debates are important claims about the impact and consequences of electoral reform for political representation and voting behavior. The study compares and evaluates two broad schools of thought, each offering contracting expectations. One popular approach claims that formal rules define electoral incentives facing parties, politicians and citizens. By changing these rules, rational choice institutionalism claims that we have the capacity to shape political behavior. Alternative cultural modernization theories differ in their emphasis on the primary motors driving human behavior, their expectations about the pace of change, and also their assumptions about the ability of formal institutional rules to alter, rather than adapt to, deeply embedded and habitual social norms and patterns of human behavior.