sou · GNB3151 · 2000-01-01 00:00:00 — Even in the absence of overt efforts by formal organizations, a mobilizing influence can emanate from social pressure, particularly when cohesive social groups exist from which individuals derive (part of) their identity. Obviously, such implicit social pressure and the more open influence of organiza- tions will usually reinforce each other. Such group-based mobili- zation was the cornerstone of the kind of electoral cleavage-poli- tics that existed in most of European democracies until the 1960s and 1970s, but that has lost most of its strength since then.3 Final- ly, the mass media play an important role in the mobilization process. After all, very few voters have direct communications with politicians or parties, and very few will be informed of appeals by parties and organized groups without media. When looking at whether or not individual people turn out to cast their vote, the logic of this approach implies that those who have been reached by mobilizing agents – or who have been reached more frequently or more intensively – will vote more often than those who were not. The kind of people that are more likely to be reached by mobilizing agents are those that are com- paratively easily targetted as recipients of messages and influence attempts, such as members of parties, organized interest groups or cohesive social groups.4 The logic of this approach is quite compelling when we observe that the efforts of parties and others to mobilize voters vary widely across different elections, and that turnout rates across 3For the genesis and historical roots of cleavage politics, see Lipset and Rokkan (1967), and Urwin (1970) and Lijphart (1968). For the most wide-ranging and comparative study that documents the decline of cleavage politics – and of the causes of this decline – see Franklin, and Valen (1992). 4Obviously, people wo are eager for information can also easily be reached, but this refers not only to the efforts of mobilizing agents, but to the interaction of their efforts with qualities of voters (the first of the approaches, discussed above). those elections often vary concomitantly. The contrast between national parliamentary elections on the one hand and elections to Parliament on the other is a case in point. It has been well documented that the mobilizing efforts of parties and media are much smaller in the latter than in the former, as indicated by their spending in European elections only a fraction of the resour- ces they are accustomed to spend in contests for the national par- liament.5 Still, this approach too, has its persistently weak side. When controlling for having been reached by parties, and for having been exposed to mobilizing information and communica- tion, one still observes large differences in turnout. Some people evidently go to the polls to cast their vote even without having been prodded to do so, while for others the most intensive barrage of mobilizing efforts remains without effect. To a large extent these differences in behavior coincide with the differences in vo- ters characteristics that were identified as important by the pre- vious approach. Who votes depends on the election-specific context In this perspective the starting point is the recognition that every election again is a different one, with its own idiosyncracies. The special aspects of one election, that may help to bring some people to the polling station, may be absent in another election, with the effect that some of them will now stay home, while others will be motivated instead to cast their vote. From this perspective, it de- pends on the aspects that characterize each election in turn who will turn out and who will not. In order to avoid confusion, it must be emphasized that this tradition comes in two different forms, one analytical, and one narrative in character. The latter comprises a large number of case studies of single elections – often in pleasant narrative and at first sight quite convincing. Sometimes written by political journalists, sometimes by academics, these accounts try to make a specific election intelligible by pointing to the particular character of the 5 See, e.g., Blumler (1983), (1985), and Franklin (1996). WHY SOME PEOPLE VOTE AND OTHERS DO NOT contest, the unique set of candidates or parties that was pitted against each other, the particular political events or possibly even scandals, the charismatic character of some of the main actors, the novelty of how the media operated, the unusual economic or social circumstances that surrounded the election, and so forth. From all these aspects, a chronicle is woven that leaves no room for any other election outcome than the one that indeed materialized. Publications such as these are of great value for getting a taste of what was going on at the election in question, to refresh ones memory in terms of a chronology or of – indeed – the idiosyncra- sies of the contest at that time and place. But they are not of great analytical value. Their defect is that the accounts they provide are in no sensible way testable – hence cannot be rejected as inade- quate explanations. A gifted story can in this way make a convincing account for any election, using only well-established facts. The trouble is, however, that a different selection from the abundance of well-established facts can equally well be combined into a seemingly convincing story, but entirely different in con- tents and possibly even incompatible with or contradictory to other ones. This problem can only be remedied by an explicit comparative perspective. The analytical tradition of the specific election context approach is based on comparison. A specific election context can only be sensibly described by explicit comparison. An account that emphasizes, for example, that an incumbent lost an election be- cause of being embroiled in a scandal, requires for testing that other elections are also investigated in which other incumbents were involved in scandals, as well as elections where the incum- bents were not, but where their opponents were, or where nobody was. On the basis of Mills time-honored logic of concomitant variation (, 1974/75), only such a comparison can reveal whether or not the attribution of certain outcomes to the factor incumbent involved in scandal holds up or has to be rejected as ad hoc. It will be obvious that such explicit comparison requires more abstraction in its explanatory terms, or, in the terms of Przeworski and Teunes (1970) seminal contribution on the topic, it requires the replacement of proper names by theoretically inte- resting concepts. An important set of such theoretically interesting concepts are provided by the general theoretical framework of rational choice, in which behavior is explained by peoples evaluation of the costs and benefits (monetary or otherwise) associated with each of the alter- native courses of action that are open to them. Applied to the question who votes and who does not, the answer will be that people will vote if the benefits of that action outweigh the costs, and that they will abstain in the opposite case. In order to avoid the tautology that all action is rational, as it otherwise would not have been undertaken, costs and benefits are usually restricted to peoples economic and political goals or interests. In a somewhat different, but compatible, terminology, voters evaluate what is at stake in a particular election and, depending on their individual goals and interests, their perceptions and expectations, may arrive at different conclusions in different elections. In some situations the stakes are sufficiently high to warrant the trouble of going to the polls, in other situations they are not and abstention will be the result. The task of the analyst is to identify the contextual factors that render a specific election more (or conversely, less) conse- quential than another for specific voters, and thus to explain their turning out (or conversely, not) in these events. The perspective of what is at stake is particularly suited for shedding light on differences between elections in terms of indi- vidual electoral participation (why does the same voter vote in one election, while abstaining in another one, whereas this pattern may be the reverse for another voter) and of aggregate turnout (why is the percentage of turnout higher in one election than in another?). Barring rather infrequent changes in the electoral system and in electoral procedures, we may assume the cost of voting to be rather invariant across elections.6 Consequently, differences in 6 In some instances this assumption is unwarranted even in the absence of changes in electoral procedures or the electoral system. Elections may differ in terms of relevant opportunity costs, as will be the case when one is located in a vacation period and another one is not. WHY SOME PEOPLE VOTE AND OTHERS DO NOT individual or aggregate behavior have to be understood from dif- in the benefit side, i.e. in differences of what voters per- ceive to be at stake. These perceptions can be thought of to be affected by a number of factors. The most important difference in what is at stake in an election relate to the political, and in particular the policy, consequences an election may conceivably generate. If, for example, no program- matic (or other relevant) differences exist between all (or even most) parties, the stakes are less, because the same policy conse- quences can be expected to occur irrespective of which party wins.7 But even if programmatic differences do exist between contending parties or candidates, the stakes will – ceteris paribus – be low when it can not be expected that these will be reflected in actual govern- ment policies, dependent on whom wins the election. In the case of European elections, for example, no clearly discernable relation exists between the election result on the one hand and the policies of the EU on the other hand, as the composition of Parliament has no consequences for the composition of relevant policy-making institutions such as Commission, or Council. This is in sharp contrast to elections for national parliaments in parliamentary systems, where the election result affects the political color of the administration. This difference may also be expressed as a dif- in (the extent and scope of) executive power that is affec- ted by elections.8 Equally detrimental to the feeling that something important is at stake is the voters belief that the outcome of the election is a foregone conclusion. Here perceptions of what other 7In this, and the remainder of the argument, it is the perception of the voter that is of relevance, and not the assessment of an analyst, politician or journalist. For the sake of brevity, this will not always be spelled out in detail in the text. Similarly, whatever differences voters perceive to exist between parties, must matter to them, i.e., must relate to the goals, values or policy preferences they hold. 8It is particularly this kind of difference that distinguishes so-called first- order elections (in which executive power is at stake) from second-order ones, where this is not the case. See, e.g., and (1980), and Marsh and Franklin (1996). voters will do are of immediate relevance, but the existence of such perceptions is not unlikely in view of the information voters acquire about others preferences, either via informal commu- nications or by way of pre-election opinion polls. When neither sincere nor tactical voting may conceivably affect the election result in a way that matters for a voter, the stakes are low: the election will then always be expected to yield the same result (desired or not).9 Although this approach is very powerful in explaining the dif- in electoral participation between (national) parliamen- tary or presidential elections on the one hand, and local, regional and European elections on the other, it has so far been less suc- cessful in identifying the contextual factors that can explain varia- tions in turnout between elections of the same kind, particularly between different first-order elections (see also note 7). What is the reason for – sometimes quite sizeable – differences in the per- centage of people that cast their ballot from one national parlia- mentary election to the next? The factors mentioned above do not seem to vary very much, so other contextual factors must be called upon to help. As a contextual factor, the closeness of the race has often been hypothesized to be important, but the empirical support for this is so far limited at best, while the applicability of this hypothesis is only straightforward in two-party systems.10 Hypotheses about yet other contextual factors are, however, rather scarce in the literature. With respect to second-order elec- tions it has been established that an important contextual factor that affects their importance to voters is their location in the cycle 9One could object to this line of reasoning, as some theorists do, on the grounds of the infinitesimal small likelihood that a single voters ballot will swing the election result in a way that matters to that voter. The reply to this objection is either that voters estimates of this probability is grossly exagerated, or that voters act on the belief that others exist with identical preferences, and that collectively their votes do matter. See also Franklin, (1996). 10For a first review of the effect of closeness of the race, see , 1999. WHY SOME PEOPLE VOTE AND OTHERS DO NOT of first-order elections,11 but this too, is insufficient to fully account for, e.g., the decline in turnout in the 1999 elections to Parliament in most countries of Union. Returning to the question addressed in this report – why some people vote and others do not – the reasoning above leads to the identification of a series of characteristics of individuals that can be expected to affect their likelihood of voting. First of all, it is necessary that voters have political goals or ; if they do not, no benefits are to be achieved from voting. Second, they must per- ceive differences between parties in the respects that matter to them.12 In line with the argument above, voters must have the feeling that (executive) power is at stake and that the election re- sult can go different ways. Some of these latter requirements seem tall orders if voters were to develop such knowledge or in- formation entirely on their own. They can, however, make use of various sources from which they can derive information and cues about the nature of the various parties, about what is at stake, and so on. Thus, in this approach, availability of and exposure to such sources is also an important distinguishing characteristic of vo- ters.13 What is the nature of the act of voting? The three approaches that were discussed above differ in what they see as the nature of the voting act. In addition, yet other interpre- 11See Franklin, van der Eijk and Oppenhuis (1996), Oppenhuis (1995) and Franklin (1996). 12Obviously, this also implies that they have more or less developed per- ceptions about parties or candidates whatsoever. 13The extent to which the social and political context provides voters with relevant information and cues in this respect is therefore of particular importance. In a comparative study, and (1988) demonstrated that the Swedish context is much more conducive to voters acquiring relevant information than that of the . In a dif- ferent study, (1997) showed that a context that provides sufficient relevant cues can overcome informational deficiencies of voters. tations are often referred to that are not straightforwardly associ- ated with any of these approaches, but that have to be discussed nonetheless. The last-mentioned approach, that emphasizes the election- specific context, clearly looks at voting as instrumental behavior, by which political interests, goals, and causes are expressed on the ballot. In this view, differences in turnout indicate that not all elections are seen by voters as equally important as means to further these interests and goals, but such differences in turnout are not necessarily worrisome in themselves. low turnout, however, indicates that many voters view the election at hand as barely or not at all relevant to their substantive political interests and concerns. If persistent, this constitutes a threat to the notion of representative democratic governance. A quite different interpretation of what the voting act means for people emphasizes that it allows the expression of identity and identification. In this view, voting is not intrinsically different from other kinds of behavior that can be understood from the per- spective of identity politics, and the usage of which cannot be re- duced to instrumental motivations and the cost-benefit reasoning implicit therein. This interpretation of the meaning of the voting act is particularly related to the first two approaches to the expla- nation of (non-)voting discussed above. When party-related iden- tities exist but are not very deeply entrenched, then mobilizing efforts of parties and others are necessary to remind people thereof. When party-related identities are deeply seated in peoples consciousness, then these will propel them to the ballot box, even without mobilizing efforts by others. When parties (or candidates) are not linked to voters political identities or identifications, mo- bilizing efforts appealing to them will be of no avail, and other (instrumental) appeals have to be made. This view on the meaning of voting does not in itself regard low turnout as worrisome. It merely indicates that the number of people who identify (in a psychologically meaningful sense of the word) with specific politi- cal groups or organizations (such as parties) is small. This would only be problematic to the extent that one would view such iden- WHY SOME PEOPLE VOTE AND OTHERS DO NOT tifications as prerequisite for social integration, but that would probably constitute a fallacy of the pars pro toto kind.14 A third interpretation of the meaning of the voting act is that it expresses support for the political system as such. In its negative form, it holds that non-voting expresses lack of support, or even rejection of the existing political system. This interpretation is not directly linked to any of the three approaches to understanding (non-)voting, but may – under appropriate circumstances – follow from each. Not having been socialized into support for the exist- ing political order would lead to abstention, as much as being mo- bilized into an electoral boycott. Even from an instrumental per- spective, non-voting may be the choice for those who reject the current system in favor of another that they expect to be advanced by electoral abstentionism. Yet, neither of these hypothetical situations seems to be empirically relevant in any of the estab- democracies of Union.15 In its strong form (non-voting implying rejection of the existing political re- gime), this view of the meaning of the voting act seems relevant. In a milder interpretation, non-voting would be regarded as the result of indifference to or disenchantment with the demo- cratic system, a condition that under specific circumstances would indeed bode ill for democratic stability. This interpretation of non- voting has in recent years become en vogue in political commentary in various countries. In it became known as the phenomenon of Politikverdrossenheit (a term relating to a syn- drome of cynicism, distrust, and withdrawal), in the 14The tremendous decline in such identifications as reported in the lite- rature on party identification on the one hand (see the review in and Wattenberg, 1993), and in the decline of cleavage politics on the other (e.g., Franklin, and Valen, 1992), cannot in any convincing man- ner be linked to social disintegration. 15See, in this respect, in particular the various contributions of the Beliefs in Government project (Kaase and , 1995), where the relationship between citizens and their states is probed in rather great detail and as much as possible in historically comparative perspective. Most relevant in the context of this report are (references) Biorcio and (1995) and Topf (1995). as the kloof (the idea of an unbridgeable chasm between voters and the political professionals).16 In spite of the apparent plausibility of such interpretations, empirical support is lacking. Extensive ana- lysis of the data from a recent study of and the Nether- lands led to the conclusion that neither the declining membership of political parties, nor the possibly declining rate of participation in elections is sufficient ground for assuming a crisis in the relationship between voters and politics, as is implied in the very terminology of Verdrossenheit and kloof. Rather, these phenomena reflect changes in the position of parties vis-a-vis other actors in the political realm. (and , 1998, p. In its positive form, however, the support for the political sys- tem interpretation holds that the act of voting allows the expres- sion of feelings of civic-mindedness, citizen duty, and so forth, feelings that would be commensurate with the notion of diffuse support for the existing political order. This interpretation coin- cides with the approach that looks at voters characteristics (par- ticularly the presence or absence of civic attitudes) in explaining electoral participation. Forces impinging on the decision to vote or not The considerations from the preceding sections can be summari- zed into three different kinds of forces that – in isolation or in combination – impact on the decsion to vote or to abstain: 1.Coercion, pressure and persuasion. This may exist in the form of some legal obligation (such as compulsory voting) or the absence thereof. 17 In a different form, the expectation of 16The debates on Verdrossenheit and kloof have been summarized in and (1998). A particularly relevant contribution to these discussions is and Andeweg (1994). 17Apart from legal conditions, research has been conducted into the existence of other coercive pressures. Common wisdom holds such WHY SOME PEOPLE VOTE AND OTHERS DO NOT positive or negative sanctions (including social approval or being ostracized) will constitute pressure to either cast a ballot or alternatively to stay away from the polls. Most mobilizing appeals in modern campaigns are focussed on persuasion. This derives from the possibility of expressing authentic feelings, such as a sense of citizen duty, or identification with groups or parties, etc. Obviously, de- pending on the kind of feeling, it may be voting as well as non- voting that yields satisfaction. In this case the differential of effort versus benefit, or the assessment of what is at stake determines whether the voter casts a ballot or not. In explaining why some people vote and others do not, one can assess the power of each of the different approaches mentioned so far, and subsequently one can combine them into a single expla- natory model. In the next part of this report, I will analyse survey data pertaining to electoral participation in at the occasion of the elections to Parliament of 1999. As is often the case in empirical research, the data available from this study do not cover all factors that one can think of theoretically and that have been mentioned in the previous pages. Lack of space as well as empirical insights from other studies result in leaving out of the questionnaire those factors that are expected to be of explanatory power. The analyses to be presented will therefore neither for each of the various approaches separately, nor for their combination, yield a full account of the question why some people vote and others do not in this specific historical situation.