Electoral Participation

Abstract

Until the mid-1990s, little attention was paid to nonvoting and non-voters in Scandinavia.¹ The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the social and other determinants of nonvoting were thought to be well known and stable (Korpi 1981; Valen and Aardal 1983) — apart from gender differences, which received some interest when the gender gap reversed in the 1980s. Secondly, survey data on the levels of abstention are not very reliable (Granberg and Holmberg 1991) and make it difficult to analyse nonvoting in general election studies.² But most importantly, studying nonvoting seemed of little relevance because of the high turnout rates. Unlike the USA, where studies of nonvoting mushroomed as a response to declining turnout in the 1970s (for example, Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980; Burnham 1980; Boyd 1981; Abramson and Aldrich 1982; Avey 1989), Scandinavian figures were stable or even increasing when political trust declined in the 1970s. Thus, Scandinavia was only interesting as high-turnout countries in comparative studies of the determinants of nonvoting (Jackman 1987). What was to be explained was why turnout was so high in Scandinavia (Pettersen 1989).