Abstract
The 2002 elections marked yet another fall in turnout, bringing voter participation to one of its lowest levels ever. The persistence and pervasiveness of the contemporary turnout problem is illustrated in Figure 7.1, which presents data on turnout in general, local and presidential elections in Ireland since 1969.
The act of voting requires the citizen to make not a single choice but two. He must choose between rival parties and candidates. He must also decide whether to vote at all.1
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Notes
Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960), p. 89.
Evidence for these trends is available from the website of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), at http://www.idea.int/. Estimation of voter turnout depends on having an accurate electoral register. Recent research has argued that turnout in Ireland has been under-reported by about five percentage points but that these inaccuracies do not account for turnout decline, nor for the difference in turnout between urban and rural areas: see Eoin O’Malley ‘Apathy or error? Questioning the Irish register of electors’, Irish Political Studies 16 (2001), pp. 215–24.
For a discussion of these in the Irish context see Richard Sinnott, Irish Voters Decide (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 18–22.
André Blais, To Vote or Not to Vote: the merits and limits of rational choice theory (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000), p. 27.
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967).
Alexander A. Schuessler, A Logic of Expressive Choice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: civic voluntarism in American politics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
This level of over-reporting is about the same as that found in the 1996 American National Election Study. For more details on the issue of misreporting see Keith Swaddle and Anthony Heath, ‘Official and reported turnout in the British general elections of 1987’, British Journal of Political Science 19:4 (1989), pp. 537–51.
Thirty-seven per cent of registered electors did not vote, but only 15 per cent of the IMS sample is composed of non-voters. One solution to this problem is to weight the IMS sample to make the proportions of voters and non-voters fit with the official electoral figures. A second issue is the effect of some respondents falsely claiming to have voted. There is insufficient information to correct for this problem but it has been argued that it has the consequence of magnifying the real differences between voters and non-voters: see Benjamin Highton and Raymond E. Wolfinger, ‘Notes and comments: the political implications of higher turnout’, British Journal of Political Science 31:1 (2001), pp. 179–233, at p. 183.
This distinction is developed in greater detail in Jean Blondel, Richard Sinnott and Palle Svensson, People and Parliament in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 30–54;
see also Michael Marsh, ‘Accident or design? Non-voting in Ireland’, Irish Political Studies 6 (1991), pp. 1–14.
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Lyons, P., Sinnott, R. (2003). Voter Turnout in 2002 and Beyond. In: Gallagher, M., Marsh, M., Mitchell, P. (eds) How Ireland Voted 2002. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379046_7
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