Previous research on leader effects has focused exclusively on the impact of voters’ evaluations of leaders on vote choice, disregarding possible effects on the prior step of deciding whether or not to turn out to vote. In line with the personalisation of politics thesis, leaders have a higher impact among dealigned voters. Previous studies have demonstrated that leader effects are stronger among voters who voice their dealignment – namely party switchers. However, the potential impact of leaders among those who exited (i.e., who have abstained) is still unstudied. Could leaders have a mobilisation effect and therefore trigger turnout decisions? What characteristics of party leaders are more relevant in this regard? This article is the first comparative study to examine how the evaluation of party leaders’ traits influences voter turnout in general elections. The work incorporates data from election studies across seven countries with different social contexts (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Hungary). Characteristics of leaders were grouped into two dimensions – competence and warmth – in accordance with the stereotype content model and relevant studies on leaders’ traits evaluation. Multiple binary logistic regression models were performed to analyse the predictive power of competence and warmth on turnout, controlling for sociodemographic, political ideology variables and voters’ past political behaviour. Results reinforce the personalisation of politics theory, showing the utmost relevance of warmth personality traits of leaders in voter turnout decisions. Competence personality traits were found to be relevant only in some situations. Interaction effects were also demonstrated between warmth evaluations and identifying with a right‐wing party as well as past political behaviour with both warmth and competence.

Since the heyday of cleavage voting in the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of studies presents evidence of a decline in cleavage voting – caused by either structural or behavioural dealignment. Structural dealignment denotes changes in group size responsible for a decrease in cleavage voting, whereas behavioural dealignment concerns weakening party–voter links over time. A third phenomenon posited in this article is the collective voting abstention of certain (social) groups, here referred to as ‘political dealignment’, which results in a new type of division of voting versus abstention. The purpose of this article is to examine the three underlying mechanisms for the decline in social class and religious cleavage voting across four Western countries (Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States) over the last 40–60 years using longitudinal post‐election data. The results prove a strong presence of political dealignment and increasing turnout gaps regarding both the class and religious cleavage. Furthermore, whenever a decline in cleavage voting is present, it is mainly caused by changes in the social groups’ behaviour and less by changing social structures in a country.

This article examines the link between personality traits, political attitudes and the propensity to vote in elections, using an Internet panel survey conducted in two Canadian provinces at the time of the 2008 federal election and the subsequent provincial elections. It first establishes that the two most proximate attitudes that shape one's propensity to vote are political interest and sense of civic duty. The article then look at specific personality traits (altruism, shyness, efficacy and conflict avoidance) that could affect level of political interest, civic duty and the propensity to vote in elections. In the last part of the analysis, a model is proposed and tested, according to which the impact of personality traits is indirect, being mediated by interest and duty. The article shows that the data are consistent with such an interpretation.

Using individual data on Swiss federal ballots (VOX data) and an original dataset on the evolution and content of political campaigns, this article elucidates how negative campaigning influences individual turnout during Swiss federal ballots. It hypothesises that the effect of negativism on turnout depends on ‘which camp goes dirty’ and, specifically, on the direction of the political campaign (‘status quo’ versus ‘policy change’ campaigns). A series of multilevel models provide strong support for the hypotheses, by showing that high negativism in ‘status quo campaigns’ decreases individual turnout, whereas high negativism for ‘policy change campaigns’ increases it. It is argued here that this could depend on the emotional responses triggered by negativism in political campaigns.

In the United States, active church membership among ethnic and racial minorities has been linked to higher political participation. In Europe, the influence of religious attendance on political mobilisation of ethnic minorities has so far been little explored, despite the heated public debate about the public role of religion and particularly Islam. This study uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to theorise the relationship between religious attendance and political participation of ethnic minorities in a European context and extend existing theories to non‐Christian minority religions. The article shows that despite a significantly different context in which religion's place in political life is more contentious, regular religious attendance increases political participation rates of ethnic minorities. Some possible explanatory mechanisms are tested and an important distinction is introduced between those mechanisms that mediate, and those that moderate the impact of religion. The study finds that British minority churches and places of worships vary in how willing and effective they are in politically motivating their worshippers, and concludes that this relates to the political salience of certain religions within the United Kingdom context.

The relationship between party system fragmentation and voter turnout is a long-standing phenomenon, the form of which has not yet been precisely defined. Using data from the Round 10 of European Social Survey (2020–2022), this article attempts to investigate the relationship across European democracies. Consistently with previous research, association between party system fragmentation as well as increase in number of parties between elections and turnout seems to be negative but rather weak. However, as could be expected based on a rational choice theory and cognitive overload, the effect depends on several individual and context level characteristics. The results suggest that negative effect of fragmentation may be attenuated by a high degree of partisanship. On the other hand, it may be strengthened in the context of an unanchored party system, as demonstrated in the case of Eastern and Central Europe compared to Western Europe, or by lower levels of political polarization.

Over the past decades, diasporas’ engagement in homeland elections has become a highly salient issue, especially given the widespread implementation of enfranchisement policies for citizens living abroad. Spain stands out in the European context with its long emigration history, its sizeable population abroad, and the enactment of the so-called ‛voto rogado’ (‛begged vote’) system that hindered external voting by requiring non-resident citizens to submit a separate voter registration application to become eligible for casting the ballot in Spanish elections. Yet, little is known so far about the voting patterns of Spaniards abroad. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the electoral (non)alignment between resident and non-resident voters in the Spanish general elections held over the past three decades. We argue that a comprehensive assessment of electoral (non)alignment must consider two different analytical layers of turnout and party choice. The article shows that changing electoral rules on extraterritorial voting, the increasingly diverse profile of Spaniards abroad, and Spanish parties’ strategies towards the diaspora interact to account for differences in overseas Spaniards’ turnout rates and party choices when compared to resident voters.

This study examines political media consumption among non-resident citizens, and whether following politics in traditional and social media in their country of residence and origin has a mobilizing effect on voting in origin-country elections. The topic of our study is inspired by the trend towards increased enfranchisement of external citizens, improved methods for participation from abroad, and the transformation of the media landscape with enhanced possibilities for external voters to follow politics in their country of origin. Based on a survey directed towards a stratified random sample of Finnish external citizens in 15 countries, we find that politically oriented media consumption in the country of origin substantially increases the likelihood of participating in origin-country elections and that this effect holds for traditional media channels as well as for social media. A corresponding mobilizing effect is, however, not found for following politics in the country of residence. This demonstrates the value of relevant information for political participation.

Recent voter turnout data has revealed a consistent and growing turnout gap between Black and White Americans since the 2012 Presidential election. Scholars have attributed this gap to an increase in restrictive voting laws. However, few have considered the decreased effectiveness of long-standing models of political behavior on Black voter turnout as the American political landscape has shifted. This note seeks to uncover patterns in recent Presidential elections that display a lack of effectiveness of prominent voter turnout models for Black Americans due to disparate socializing experiences in a post-Obama context like voter suppression and a global pandemic. It employs models previously used by Leighley and Vedlitz (1999) to evaluate and compare turnout models for Black and White individuals with mini-meta analysis. This paper utilizes the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (CMPS) and the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Study to establish models and measure their impact on Black and White voter turnout. I find support that prominent turnout models behave differently in a post-Obama context like income, length of residence, group consciousness, and group threat while some models behave differently for Black and white voters like political interest and political efficacy. These findings assert that new turnout models need to be established to better understand the Black electorate in a post-Obama context.

This paper studies voter turnout and selective abstention on voting days with more than one election or referendum. We extend the rational choice model to a setting with multiple concurrent votes. The model is based on a voter’s net benefit, which includes a vote’s salience and information costs. It explains how the net benefit of different concurrent votes enters a voter’s utility function and thereby affects turnout and selective abstention, the tendency to vote in one but not all votes held on the same day. We test our theoretical predictions using data on concurrent propositions in Switzerland from 1988 to 2016. Our results suggest that the proposition with the highest net benefit and the sum of the net benefits of all concurrent propositions are relevant determinants of the individual turnout decision. We also find that a proposition’s net benefit explains variation in selective abstention.

I investigate the impact of proportional representation (PR) and majoritarian rule (MR) on voter turnout and minority representation using theory and experiments. Numerous empirical studies have compared turnout across PR and MR. However, the empirical evidence is mixed. I show theoretically and experimentally that the comparison of turnout across PR and MR depends on the size of the minority but the empirical papers on the topic do not control for it. I also show that, in both theory and data, PR improves minority representation at a minute cost to efficiency if the size of the minority is sufficiently large. However, the representation of a small minority does not show a remarkable improvement under PR, unlike what the theory predicts. I conjecture that, under PR, there is a discouragement effect for the small minority because the PR system that I employ has an election threshold. As a result, the impact of the voting system on representation may be sensitive to both the size of the minority and the degree of proportionality.

We test the turnout predictions of the canonical costly voting model through a large-scale, real effort experiment. We recruit 1200 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and employ a $2\times 2$ between subjects design encompassing small ($N=30$) and large ($N=300$) elections, as well as close and lopsided. As predicted, participants with a higher opportunity cost are less likely to vote; turnout rate decreases as the electorate size increases in lopsided elections and increases the closer the election is in large elections. However, in the large lopsided election the majority turns out to vote at a higher rate than the minority. We rationalize these results as the equilibrium outcome of a model in which voters obtain a small non-monetary utility if they vote and their party wins.

We present results from a pre-registered, well-powered $(N \gt 3,000,000)$ text message get-out-the-vote (GOTV) experiment, conducted during the 2019 European Parliament election in Sweden. Our findings suggest that a simple text message increases the likelihood of voting by 0.3 percentage points. Half of this effect spills over to untreated household members while workplace spillovers are near zero. Subsequent analysis reveals that the direct treatment effect is noticeably stronger among individuals with below-average voting propensities. Interestingly, within this same group, the household spillovers are significantly negative. We speculate and provide some indirect evidence, that these negative spillover effects may stem from the text message reminder influencing the behaviour of voters already motivated to vote. Above all, we propose that an increase in early voting, as opposed to voting on Election Day, among treated individuals may weaken the mechanisms thought to explain spillover effects since voters are less likely to bring their family members with them when voting early.

Whether referendums, initiatives, and other mechanisms of direct democracy enhance representative systems is a matter of debate. Skeptics note—among other criticisms—that turnout tends to be low in referendums, often lower than in candidate elections in the same country. If citizens do not care enough to participate, how useful can these mechanisms be for improving the quality of democratic systems? We argue that low referendum turnout has as much to do with parties’ disincentives to mobilize voters as it does with voter disinterest. Prior research on political behavior in referendums has focused largely on Europe and assumes that voters view them as elections of lesser importance. By shifting focus to Latin America, we introduce more variation in the features of political parties that influence levels of turnout. We draw on cross-national evidence, qualitative research in Colombia, and quantitative analysis of municipal-level referendum voting behavior in Brazil. The key to understanding low voter turnout in these settings is the relatively weaker incentives that political parties have to turn out the vote when control over office is not at stake. We demonstrate that, in clientelistic systems, party operatives have particularly weak incentives to get their constituents out to the polls.

Scholars have studied the carceral state extensively. However, little is known about the ‘shadow’ carceral state, coercive institutions lacking even the limited safeguards of the carceral state. Pretrial incarceration is one such institution. It often lasts months and causes large resource losses. Yet it is imposed in rushed hearings, with wide discretion for bail judges. These circumstances facilitate quick, heuristic judgments relying on racial stereotypes of marginalized populations. We merge court records from Miami-Dade with voter records to estimate the effect of this ‘shadow’ institution on turnout. We find that quasi-randomly assigned harsher bail judges depress voting by Black and Hispanic defendants. Consistent with heuristic processing, these racial disparities result only from inexperienced judges. Unlike judge experience, judge race does not matter; minority judges are as likely to impose detention and reduce turnout. The ‘shadow’ carceral state undermines democratic participation, exacerbating racial inequality.

What is the effect of personal discrimination on the political engagement of ethnic and racial minorities? Existing research theorizes increased engagement, but evidence is mixed. The discrimination and political engagement link is tested across six countries: Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Interest in politics and political actions (e.g. protest and donations) show constant relationships: people who have experienced discrimination have more interest in politics and take more political actions. There is no clear evidence of different effects of political vs social discrimination. However, the link between turnout and discrimination varies systematically across countries: a positive correlation in three separate American datasets, but mixed and null in other countries. This may be the result of the distinctive American conflict over voting rights for racial minorities. The conclusion discusses priorities for future research, including a focus on establishing causal relationships and testing mechanisms.

How scholars conceptualize and measure the gender gap in mobilization can have profound consequences for substantive conclusions. Scholars typically refer to a difference between women and men's turnout (difference-in-proportions measure) or a fraction of women voters among all voters (proportion measure). Using the case of proportional representation (PR) reform in Norway, I demonstrate that, in the context of low men's turnout, the proportion measure indicates that PR narrows the gap, while the difference-in-proportion measure indicates that it widens the gap. This is because mobilizing fewer women than men widens the difference between women and men's turnout, but may constitute a greater proportional increase in women's mobilization compared to men when only a few men (and even fewer women) vote. These findings bring together seemingly opposing arguments in the PR-gap debate and have wide implications for the study of ‘gaps’ within and beyond gender scholarship.