Political Participation

Voter Turnout Over Time

Table 8.1 shows mean turnout by decade in democratic legislative elections held since the 1960s. An election is deemed to be democratic when it takes place in a country with a score of 1 or 2 on the Freedom House [Page 166]ratings of political rights the year the election was held. Turnout is measured as a percentage of those registered who cast a vote.1

TABLE 8.1 Voter turnout by country and decade

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TABLE 8.1 Voter turnout by country and decade

[Page 168]Mean turnout in legislative elections is now around 70%. Whether this is high or low depends on one's expectations. The bottom line, however, is that in almost all elections, voters outnumber abstainers and that typically between two-thirds and three-fourths of those registered cast a vote.

Table 8.1 shows that turnout has declined in the recent past. Mean turnout from the 1960s through the 1980s was close to 80%. There has been a substantial turnout decline, and the decline can be observed in almost all countries. The only countries where turnout has not gone down since the 1980s are: Botswana, Luxembourg, Bahamas, Belize, Trinidad & Tobago, Australia, and Uruguay. In the opposite direction, mean turnout has declined by more than 10 points in each of the following countries: France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Barbados, Canada, Costa Rica, Dominica, St Vincent & Grenadines, Kiribati, and Argentina.

A number of studies have shown that the turnout decline is concentrated among the youth (Blais et al. 2004; Clarke et al. 2004: ch. 8; Lyons and Alexander 2000; Miller and Shanks 1996: ch. 5; Wass 2007; Wattenberg 2007: ch. 4). This suggests that the decline is the result of generational replacement. This, of course, raises the question of why recent generations are less prone to vote, a question that we address below. This trend has spurred great concern about how to get more young people to the polls, including some consideration for compulsory voting (see Milner 2002; Wattenberg 2007: ch. 7).

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