Political Scale and Electoral Turnout: Evidence From the Less Industrialized World

This article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics. Explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world, it explores the impact of variations in community size relative to other influences on citizen participation. The findings, which draw on both aggregate and individual-level data at the subnational level of analysis, offer considerable evidence that electoral participation declines with community size, but for reasons largely neglected by most prior literature on electoral turnout. The central theoretical conclusion is that future comparative research needs to address the role of political scale more directly and systematically.