Generational Basis of Turnout Decline in Established Democracies

Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Recent research has shown that elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a ‘footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This realization requires us to take a new approach to understanding the mainsprings of turnout change — and hence of turnout decline. In this paper, we theorize about the longitudinal effects on turnout of changes in the character of elections, and test this theory using data from every one of the 22 countries that have held elections continuously since 1945: 356 elections in all.