Turnout determinants in democracies and in non-democracies

Elections are celebrated in democracies as well as in non-democracies. Studies on the factors explaining turnout normally focus, however, only on democracies. Are turnout patterns different in non democracies? If so, how different are those? In this paper I address this issue with a unique dataset covering 1251 elections -678 democratic (in 107 countries) and 250 nondemocratic elections (in 81 countries) for the lower house and 209 democratic (in 57 countries) and 114 nondemocratic (in 60 countries)- for the period 1961-2008. I find that the turnout determinants are contingent upon the regimes and that the most important differences lay in the institutional and in the political factors. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.