{"title":"Time will tear us apart: European electoral participation dynamics in longitudinal perspective","authors":"Davide Angelucci , Marco Improta , Romain Lachat , Davide Vittori","doi":"10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102819","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This research note investigates the development of turnout gaps in Europe, associated with four key determinants of electoral participation: income, education, age, and gender. We extend previous research on unequal turnout in two main ways. First, we include longer time series. Relying on the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, we are able to estimate turnout gaps in 240 elections from 20 countries, from the 1950s to 2020. Second, we suggest a method to compare education and income levels across elections, which is a prerequisite for estimating changes over time in their effects. We find clear evidence of growing turnout gaps linked with education, income, and age, while the gender gap has become close to null. Our findings are robust across a number of alternative model specifications, and they are consistent with results, for the more recent period, based on the European Social Survey.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48188,"journal":{"name":"Electoral Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Electoral Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424000775","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This research note investigates the development of turnout gaps in Europe, associated with four key determinants of electoral participation: income, education, age, and gender. We extend previous research on unequal turnout in two main ways. First, we include longer time series. Relying on the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database, we are able to estimate turnout gaps in 240 elections from 20 countries, from the 1950s to 2020. Second, we suggest a method to compare education and income levels across elections, which is a prerequisite for estimating changes over time in their effects. We find clear evidence of growing turnout gaps linked with education, income, and age, while the gender gap has become close to null. Our findings are robust across a number of alternative model specifications, and they are consistent with results, for the more recent period, based on the European Social Survey.
期刊介绍:
Electoral Studies is an international journal covering all aspects of voting, the central act in the democratic process. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, game theorists, geographers, contemporary historians and lawyers have common, and overlapping, interests in what causes voters to act as they do, and the consequences. Electoral Studies provides a forum for these diverse approaches. It publishes fully refereed papers, both theoretical and empirical, on such topics as relationships between votes and seats, and between election outcomes and politicians reactions; historical, sociological, or geographical correlates of voting behaviour; rational choice analysis of political acts, and critiques of such analyses.