How to Increase Turnout in Low-Salience Elections: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Concurrent Second-Order Elections on Political Participation

Abstract: Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race

Standort
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
Umfang
Online-Ressource
Sprache
Englisch
Anmerkungen
Preprint
begutachtet (peer reviewed)
In: Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM) ; 6 (2018) 3 ; 509-526

Klassifikation
Politik

Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wo)
Mannheim
(wer)
SSOAR, GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften e.V.
(wann)
2018
Urheber
Leininger, Arndt
Rudolph, Lukas
Zittlau, Steffen

DOI
10.1017/psrm.2016.38
URN
urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-71486-3
Rechteinformation
Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.
Letzte Aktualisierung
25.03.2025, 13:53 MEZ

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Beteiligte

  • Leininger, Arndt
  • Rudolph, Lukas
  • Zittlau, Steffen
  • SSOAR, GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften e.V.

Entstanden

  • 2018

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