How does ideological diversity within electoral districts shape voter turnout? We argue that participation is highest at moderate levels of ideological heterogeneity: limited disagreement can make political differences more salient and consequential, while extensive disagreement can generate ambiguity and discourage participation. Using data from 31,246 respondents during the 2015 Canadian federal election and positions on 37 policy issues, we examine this relationship at both the individual and district levels. We find a significant inverted-U relationship between individuals’ ideological distance from their district mean and their likelihood of voting, net of electoral competitiveness and campaign mobilization. District-level turnout exhibits a substantively similar, though statistically less clear, pattern. A cross-level interaction further shows that the individual-level relationship varies with district ideological heterogeneity. These findings demonstrate that turnout is shaped not simply by individual preferences or electoral competition, but by the ideological context in which voters are embedded.

Voting in the United States involves two steps: registering to vote and then casting a ballot. At the same time, the US states differ greatly in what policies govern their registration and voting processes. However, election scholars lack comprehensive and comparable measures of the distinct costs of voter registration and ballot casting, limiting our understanding of the relative difficulty of each step of the voting process, their causes, and their consequences. To alleviate this issue, we decompose the Cost of Voting Index into measures of registration and ballot-casting costs, separately. In doing so, we (1) demonstrate the multidimensionality of the COVI, (2) create a four-category typology of state-level election access ecosystems, and (3) demonstrate the value of these measures through brief examinations of frequently studied research questions. By disentangling registration and ballot-casting policies, this approach distinguishes each policy arena, allowing scholars to examine key theoretical debates about where institutional barriers matter most. These scores can be applied to a variety of research questions, including voter turnout, citizen confidence in elections, and beyond.

How do natural disasters affect electoral participation? This study examines the impact of Hurricane Helene on the 2024 presidential election in North Carolina using a difference-in-differences design comparing 13 affected counties to 87 control counties across four election cycles (2012–2024). The evidence suggests that the hurricane significantly increased voter displacement – affected counties experienced approximately a six-percentage-point rise in mail ballots sent out of state and an eight-percentage-point increase in mail ballots sent outside voters’ home ZIP codes. Despite this displacement and substantial physical damage, however, turnout remained stable and voters did not alter their voting methods. These findings suggest that with proactive institutional response, voters and election administration can show resilience, even in the face of a disaster that displaced thousands of voters.

While studies based on the civic voluntarism model generally suggest that stronger party identification increases electoral participation, other studies report mixed findings on the relationship between partisan strength and voter turnout. This study argues that the participatory effect of party identification depends on whether voters’ partisan identity is consistent with the party affiliation of their preferred candidate. Drawing on conflicted voter theory, we argue that when voters identify with one party but prefer a candidate nominated by another party, the psychological costs generated by betrayal aversion reduce their likelihood of voting. Using pooled survey data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) for Taiwan’s presidential elections from 2008 to 2024, our binary logistic regression results support this argument. This study contributes to the literature by showing that conflicted voter status should be incorporated into future studies of voter turnout. It also suggests that political parties should pay closer attention to conflicted voters in closely contested elections, because turnout differences within a small segment of the electorate can have notable political consequences.

Overestimation of turnout has long been an issue in election surveys, with nonresponse bias or voter overrepresentation identified as major sources of bias. However, adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias is substantially challenging. Based on the ANES Non-Response Follow-Up study concerning the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we investigate the role of callback data, that is, records of contact attempts in the survey course, in adjusting for nonresponse bias in the estimation of turnout. We propose a stableness of resistance assumption to account for nonignorable missingness in the outcome, which states that the impact of the missing outcome on the response propensity is stable in the first two call attempts. Under this assumption and by integrating with covariate information from the census data, we establish identifiability and develop estimation methods for turnout. Our methods produce estimates very close to the official turnout and successfully capture the trend of declining willingness to vote as response reluctance increases. This work highlights the importance of adjusting for nonignorable nonresponse bias and demonstrates the potential of widely available callback data for political surveys.

While much scholarship has considered the role of racial attitudes in shaping public opinion, this paper extends this line of research by examining how racial resentment influences voter turnout and further, how this effect differs across religious and racial groups. Building on conflict decision theory and theories of racialized social pressure, the paper develops expectations about the conditional influence of racial attitudes on voter participation, depending on these compounding religious and racial identities. Analysis of the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) reveals that racial resentment is associated with higher voter turnout among White evangelicals, Asian American evangelicals, and Latino evangelicals, while having no impact on White, Latino, and Asian Americans who do not identify as evangelical. In contrast, holding more conservative racial attitudes is associated with a lower, rather than higher, likelihood of voting among both Black evangelicals and Black non-evangelicals. The paper concludes by underscoring the need to examine how multiple social identities can structure the factors that influence political decision-making in American politics.

Many theories of political participation imply that close elections increase voter turnout, but empirical support for this is mixed. One challenge is that close elections occur in unrepresentative places, making it difficult to extend counterfactual inferences across the wider electorate. In this note, I study closeness in an alternative way by leveraging those who move home between elections. With a large‐scale longitudinal survey in Great Britain, comparing individuals who move between safe and competitive parliamentary constituencies, I provide evidence that closeness increases campaign contact but generally fails to affect turnout. British movers are politically comparable to the wider electorate, so the results can be cautiously generalised. This contributes to substantive literature on voter and party‐led theories of participation, while adopting an empirical strategy seldom used in the study of political behaviour.

Parties with left‐wing positions on economic issues and right‐wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left‐authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left‐authoritarian citizens are less likely to vote, less satisfied with the democratic process and have lower levels of political trust when there is a left‐authoritarian supply gap. Using data for 14 Western European countries from the European Social Survey 2008 in the main analysis, it is shown that left‐authoritarians are less likely to vote and exhibit lower levels of satisfaction with democracy and political trust. A supplementary analysis of national election studies from Finland before and after the electoral breakthrough of the left‐authoritarian True Finns Party in 2011 indicates that whether left‐authoritarians participate less and believe less in the efficacy of voting is contingent on the presence of a strong left‐authoritarian party. This study illuminates how constrained party supply in a two‐dimensional policy space can affect voter turnout as well as political support, and has broader implications for the potential further rise of left‐authoritarian challenger parties.

Recent research has shown that sexual and/or gender minority voters are prone to mobilizing when LGBT+ issues are on the political agenda. This increased level of political engagement is attributed to the experience of discrimination, understood both in legal and social terms, which spurs LGBT+ individuals to participate with the aim of advancing their rights. However, a crucial question remains unanswered: do these gaps in participation persist in contexts where core LGBT+ rights are protected? Drawing from comprehensive and verified data on the population of Sweden, this study finds evidence of a positive and sustained sexuality‐driven voter turnout gap across multiple elections. This gap manifests itself both shortly and a decade after the enactment of same‐sex marriage and shows no tangible signs of abating. In addition to improving our knowledge of political participation patterns among sexual minorities, these findings underscore the potential role of minority rights protection as a mechanism to ensure enduring inclusion of social minority groups within democratic processes.

Using an adoption design and data from a U.S. sample of adoptive and biological siblings and their parents, we examine the role of pre-birth (e.g., genetics) and post-birth factors (e.g., family socialization) in shaping numerous measures of political engagement, several of which have not been studied before in the context of an adoption design. Our results provide suggestive evidence that pre-birth factors play a larger role in shaping children’s political engagement than post-birth factors. More specifically, we find that the sense of responsibility to stay politically informed and vote and contacting a politician seem to be more heavily influenced by pre-birth factors than post-birth factors. Future studies should replicate these findings using larger samples and also build on our results by examining a wider array of acts of political engagement.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether citizens are more likely to vote in a political system that uses a proportional electoral system if the election is close. The results show that citizens who live in Swedish municipalities in which the competition between the two leading parties is close are more likely to vote. However, the results also show that the vote gap between the two major traditional blocs, the left and the right, is not important for citizens when they are considering whether or not to vote in municipal elections. In the study, a theoretical argument has been formulated which suggests that voters are confused and discouraged when there are many aspects to consider regarding the form of an upcoming coalition government. Accordingly, potential voters see the issue of how the coalition will be formed as too complex, and therefore the vote gap between the two blocs is not an issue that is prioritised by potential voters.

In the last 50 or so years, observers have noted with concern declining rates of voter turnout in many democracies. There has also been a perceived narrowing of ideological diversity in many party systems, with, in particular, many parties on the left moving towards the centre. However, extant literature on turnout and party systems has realized only mixed and often contrary results. By replacing poorly performing aggregate measures of polarization and number of parties with a novel measure of left party strength, a consistent association with turnout is uncovered, alongside clearer conceptualization of how ideological diversity affects turnout. Findings show that measures of party systems that capture the ideological strength and position of left parties have a significant and substantial positive association with voter turnout outperforming more commonly used aggregate measures of party systems.

This article studies the relation between self‐serving elite behaviour and citizen political participation. It uses a fixed effects approach to analyse the association between portfolio investment in tax havens and voter turnout, using data from 213 parliamentary elections in 65 countries for the period 1998–2014. For well‐functioning democracies a positive relation between the use of tax havens and voter turnout is found, suggesting that self‐serving elite behaviour is associated with citizen political mobilisation rather than voter apathy. The estimated relationship is stronger in the period after the 2008 economic crisis, when elite behaviour was a particularly salient issue.

There is a consensus in recent literature on electoral research that voter turnout rates are declining significantly. We know less, however, about when this decline started and how significant it is. In this paper, we analyse trends in electoral turnout, as reported in the IDEA dataset for 20 stable democracies over the period between 1950 and 2012, which covers 349 elections. The results show that turnout levels were stable until approximately 1980. A significant linear decline can be observed from 1980 onward. Various institutional elements related to turnout levels – such as the closeness of elections, or the effective number of parties – do not explain this spline or the particular curve of the decline. We close with a number of suggestions for future research that may ascertain this relation in more depth.

Turnout appeals are amplified in highly polarized, hotly contested elections like 2020. The political environment included social justice unrest, overt appeals to white male voters, and new voting procedures which resonated differently across intersectional identities. Gender and race politics intertwined to create a charged environment for mobilization and for social pressure to vote. We expect the nature and effectiveness of turnout appeals to have varied by race and gender intersections. In addition, given past behavior and the climate of protest, we expect individuals under 30 were less responsive to social pressures to vote. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS 2020), we examine whether individuals with different intersectional identities varied in their perception of social pressure to vote as well as in the effectiveness of that pressure. We find that voters are sensitive to social pressure appeals, but both perception and responsiveness vary with intersectional identity.

Many studies have shown that individuals who interact with government programs subsequently participate in politics at levels different from before, whether higher or lower. While most prior work examines the effect of policy recipiency, or program administration in one geographic location or at one snapshot in time, I study how the administration of Medicaid, a federal program administered by states, varies over time and by place, and how its variation in administration affects mass-level voter turnout. I argue that there are two highly salient sites of contact with the administrative state when considering effects on voter turnout: government programs and elections. I theorize that administrative burden from these sites creates interpretive effects on both those with direct public program experience and those whose experience is indirect, which shapes the likelihood of voting. Using a generalized differences-in-differences design and applying my separate, original measures of Medicaid and electoral burdens, I find that having a higher level of Medicaid burden resulted in a small but significant decrease in county-level turnout in recent national elections, net of Medicaid expansion status, burdens associated with registering to vote and voting, and other factors. These results imply that contact with the administrative state, via government program administration and elections, is a critical way in which policies shape mass-level political participation.

The declining voter turnout across democracies has raised concerns regarding its implications for democratic representation. Yet, the extent to which low turnout may undermine representation in Europe remains unclear. Do the policy preferences of voters and non-voters differ? This research addresses that question by providing the first large-scale, cross-national examination of policy preference differences between voters and non-voters in European democracies. Using data from the 2014 and 2019 waves of the European Election Study, covering 29 European democracies, I analyse differences across the left-right spectrum, economic attitudes (ie redistribution, regulation, spending), social attitudes (ie immigration, same-sex marriage, environment, and civil liberties), and views on European integration. The results reveal some disparities between voters and non-voters, but these are generally sporadic, even within individual countries, suggesting that such disparities are not the norm. Still, when differences do arise, they are not trivial. The analysis of how the electorate’s preferences would change under a hypothetical full turnout scenario suggests that these disparities can introduce meaningful biases. Using data from the British Election Study Internet Panel, I further distinguish between regular voters, peripheral voters, and perpetual non-voters and find notable heterogeneity in their policy preferences. These findings show that when turnout is low, the electorate’s overall stance reflects that of regular voters, but higher turnout mitigates this bias. Overall, the results suggest that while voters and non-voters in Europe typically hold similar policy views, occasional disparities can introduce representation bias in policy preferences, with implications for democratic representation and party strategies.

Restrictive voting laws are an increasingly salient feature of American politics. Yet estimating their direct impact on turnout is challenging, given the strategic actions political actors take to impose and mitigate the costs of these laws. Using individual-level data from Davidson County, Tennessee, we leverage variation induced by an early-morning tornado on Super Tuesday 2020 to estimate the direct causal effect of polling-site consolidations. We find moving to a new polling station decreases in-person turnout by 5.65 percentage points, on average, and that the variable cost—proxied by change in travel distance—drives almost all of this decline. Voting at a consolidated site only decreases turnout when the number of individuals assigned to a station increases by more than 100%.

In two field experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida, we present novel evidence about how emotions can be harnessed to increase voter turnout. When we inform respondents that a partisan villain would be happy if they did not vote (for example, a Gloating Villain treatment), we find that anger is activated in comparison to other emotions and turnout increases by 1.7 percentage points. In a subsequent field experiment, we benchmark this treatment to a standard GOTV message, the social pressure treatment. Using survey experiments that replicate our field experimental treatments, we show that our treatment links the act of voting to anticipated anger. In doing so, we contribute the first in-the-field evidence of how we can induce emotions, which are commonly understood to be fleeting states, to shape temporally distant political behaviours such as voting.