Do institutions really influence political participation? Contextual influences on turnout and participation in the world's democracies

This paper examines the influence of institutions and other contextual variables in a set of individual-level models of political participation, using a multi-level modelling strategy. It uses data from Citizenship Survey of the International Social Survey Programme conducted in 2004, to model relationships in many of the world's democracies. It examines the effects of variables that have been shown to be important in aggregate-level models of turnout, such as the effective number of parties, the distortions in representation associated with the electoral system, and the size of districts. It compares the institutional measures with other contextual variables that arise from rival models of individual-level political participation. The institutional variables have a modest impact on individual-level turnout, but their impact is much less important in relation to other types of participation. For the latter, non-institutional contextual variables arising from models of political participation appear to be more important.