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Turnout, party system diversity and left-of-centre parties: explaining turnout through the strength of left-of-centre parties

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The cases chosen are, by and large, determined by the availability of data. The following countries are included in the estimation: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. The 1951 election in Luxembourg was not a national election but was held only in the North and Centre constituencies, and the elections in the South and East constituencies were held in 1948 (Mackie and Rose 1991). With this in mind, turnout levels were combined for these years.

  2. The CMP constructs measures of ideological positioning on a scale that runs from − 100 to 100, with parties further to the left having lower (usually negative) scores than parties further to the right. The validity of manifesto data has also been shown to be very stable. Gable and Huber (2000) compared this approach with other common approaches used to calculate left–right party positions and found it to generate the smallest errors when predicting party ideology placements.

  3. Left party strength at the country level has a mean of − 0.48, a standard deviation of 0.47 and ranges from − 2.93 to 1.17.

  4. An unweighted polarization variable was also included but was also found to have no association with turnout. I included the weighted version in my model for two reasons. Firstly, the most successful paper on polarization by Dalton (2008) constructed his measure of polarization in this fashion. Secondly, I also weighted my key independent variable Left party strength, and so to keep these variables consistent, this approach was followed.

  5. The approach to creating this method follows Gallagher’s (2014) calculations that are based upon Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) formula of the effective number of electoral parties. The effective number of parties is calculated as follows: Effective number of parties = 1/∑ (party seat share in legislature).

  6. The variable unemployment rate which captured the unemployment rate was also considered as a control but ultimately abandoned due to collinearity with the variable unicameralism. I chose to drop the unemployment variable for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there is a clearer theoretical expectation of a relationship between turnout and unicameralism predicted in the literature, while unemployment has little track record of predicting turnout at the country level. Secondly, in all three models below, unicameralism performs well showing statistical significance, while unemployment failed to find significance in any model.

  7. Descriptive statistics of the dependent variable, key independent variables and control variables are presented in the Appendix.

  8. A fixed effects model was chosen to run the regression. While man pointed to the merits of a random effects model especially with regard to their generalizability and extendibility (see, for example, Beck and Katz 2007; Bell and Jones 2015) and a Hausman test showed a preference for such a model (see Green 2008), a fixed effects model was eventually chosen. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, the fixed effects model is widely regarded as more appropriate for the type of analysis undertaken above. Secondly, coefficients are usually smaller in a fixed effects model, and so the ‘bar is higher’ for significance. So, in an abundance of caution, a fixed effects model is reported. As expected, the unreported random effects model showed higher levels of significance for left party strength.

  9. The correlation coefficient between turnout of eligible population rises from − 0.148 to − 0.169 when you go from current left party strength to the lagged left party strength variable. Conversely, the correlation coefficient between left part strength drops from − 0.148 to − 0.0737 when you go from current turnout of eligible population to a lagged variable.

  10. As already indicated, there is little good theoretical justification for expecting a negative relationship between number of parties and turnout. However, as modest beta values are reported here I thought it prudent to assess the effect of number of parties on turnout in the fully specified model. Number of parties is not significant at the 0.01 level in either model with, or without, left party strength t – 1 included (left party strength t – 1 remains significant throughout).

  11. The variable Founding drops out of Models 1.3 and 1.6 due to collinearity.

  12. See note 9.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee, 1001 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Allan M. Wilford

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Appendix: Measures and coding

Appendix: Measures and coding

See Table 2.

Table 2 Descriptive statistics
Full size table

Turnout (registered): Valid voter turnout: percentage of registered voters casting valid votes in national legislative elections. Source: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).

Turnout (population): Valid voter turnout: percentage of eligible population casting valid votes in national legislative elections. Source: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) http://www.idea.int/.

Polarization: Standard deviation of the ideology score of parties that gain over 1% of the vote in national legislative elections weighted by party vote share. Source: Comparative Manifesto Project.

Left party strength: Ideology score of the party furthest to the left (weighted by party size) which gains over 1% of the vote in national legislative elections. Source: Comparative Manifesto Project.

Right party strength: Ideology score of the party furthest to the right (weighted by party size) which gains over 1% of the vote in national legislative elections. Source: Comparative Manifesto Project.

Parties: The effective number of parties at the electoral level. Source: Gallagher, 2014 (www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/index.php, accessed Jan 2015).

Polarization: Standard deviation for all parties that receive at least one per cent of the votes in each national election, weighted by vote share. Source: Comparative Manifesto Project.

Population: Estimated population size in millions. Source: The World Bank (www.worldbank.org).

Proportional representation: A (0,1) dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if a country has list PR.

Weekend voting: Elections held on Sunday (1), other day off the week (0). Source: Klaus Armingeon, Laura Knöpfel, David Weisstanner and Sarah Engler. 2014. Comparative Political Data Set I 1960–2012. Bern: Institute of Political Science, University of Berne.

Founding: A country’s first democratic election (1), other (0). Source: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA; www.idea.int/data-tools).

Compulsory voting: Compulsory voting laws (1), other (0). Source: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA; www.idea.int/data-tools). Unicameralism: A (0,1) dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if a country has a unicameral system.

Closeness of the election: Difference between the vote shares of the two largest parties. Source: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA; www.idea.int/data-tools).

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Wilford, A.M. Turnout, party system diversity and left-of-centre parties: explaining turnout through the strength of left-of-centre parties. Eur Polit Sci 18, 66–83 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-017-0136-5

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