The amount of scholarly attention directed at resolving the question why people turn out to cast a vote is vast. In a research field dominated by empirical studies – such as the one on voter turnout ...– an overview of where we stand and what we know is not superfluous. Therefore, the present paper reviews and assesses the empirical evidence brought forward through a meta-analysis of 83 aggregate-level studies. We thereby concentrate on the effect of socio-economic, political and institutional variables. The results argue for the introduction of a ‘core’ model of voter turnout – including, among other elements, population size and election closeness – that can be used as a starting point for extending our knowledge on why people vote.
Research about voter turnout has expanded rapidly in recent years. This article takes stock of this development by extending the meta-analysis of Geys (2006) in two main ways. First, we add 102 ...studies published between 2002 and 2015 to the initial sample of 83 studies. Overall, we document only minor changes to the original inferences. Second, since different processes might conceivably play at different levels of government, we exploit the larger sample to separately analyse the determinants of voter turnout in national versus subnational elections. We find that campaign expenditures, election closeness and registration requirements have more explanatory power in national elections, whereas population size and composition, concurrent elections, and the electoral system play a more important role for explaining turnout in subnational elections.
•We expand the meta-analysis of Geys (2006) with 102 articles to cover 185 articles.•We broadly confirm the original findings in our more diverse pool of studies.•We extend the analysis to a comparative study of national vs. subnational elections.•The explanatory power of distinct covariates is found to vary across types of elections.•Future work should attend more closely to the territorial scope of the election.
The economic importance of the welfare state has increased strongly over time, which has generated a vast academic literature studying the determinants of (preferences towards) redistribution. This ...article argues that citizens' trust in their fellow citizens can play a central role for welfare state support, because it buttresses the belief that others will not use the welfare system inappropriately. Using the fourth wave of the European Social Survey, we confirm a strong positive association between interpersonal trust and welfare state support (controlling for institutional trust). We also show that: i) this link is driven at least in part by the mechanism discussed above; ii) causality runs from interpersonal trust to welfare state support (using a sub-sample of second generation immigrants); and iii) the effect of interpersonal trust appears conditional on the perceived quality of a country's institutions.
•We argue that interpersonal trust may foster welfare state support.•Empirical evidence from the European Social Survey confirms this prediction.•Causality is confirmed using a sub-sample of second generation immigrants.•The positive effect of trust arises conditional on countries' institutional quality.
Spatial patterns in (local) government taxation and spending decisions have received a lot of attention. Still, the focus on taxation or expenditure levels in previous studies may be incomplete. ...Indeed, (rational) individuals are likely to consider the level of spending on (or taxation for) public goods provision simultaneously with how much public goods they actually receive—thus assessing the ‘price/quantity’ of government policies. Therefore, the present paper argues that incumbents may want their ‘price/quantity’ ratio to be close to that in neighbouring regions. Analysing Flemish local governments' efficiency ratings for the year 2000 (which relate total spending to the quantity of locally provided public goods), we confirm the existence of neighbourhood effects in local government policies.
Recent evidence of increasing income heterogeneity within developed countries has reignited debates concerning the redistribution of income and wealth. In this article, we contribute to this debate ...by assessing the role of individuals’ jurisdictional identification for their preferences toward intrafederation redistributive financial flows. Incorporating insights from social identity theory in a model of redistributive taxation, we show that federal, rather than local, identification can lead individuals to shift their redistribution preferences independent of their narrowly defined personal economic interests. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, welfare state support will sometimes be decreasing in national identification. We empirically assess these predictions using individual-level data from the 2008 German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) and a 2013-2014 survey among Belgian local politicians. Our findings provide strong support for the model’s core predictions in both settings.
Do politicians perceive scandals differently when they implicate members of their own party rather than another party? We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment, whereby we ...randomly assign UK local councillors (N = 2133) to vignettes describing a major national-level scandal in their own party versus another party. Our results show that local politicians perceive a significantly larger impact of this national scandal on the national party image when it concerns their own party (relative to another party). When evaluating the same scandal’s impact on the local party image, no similar effect is observed. This suggests that local politicians tone down the local impact of a national scandal more when thinking about their own party. We suggest this derives from a form of motivated reasoning whereby politicians selectively focus on information allowing a more negative view of direct electoral opponents. These findings arise independent of the type of scandal under consideration.
In this article, we study the political implications of terrorism rooted in extremist political ideologies. Our data uniquely allow studying the potential role of party leader evaluations on ...political outcomes, including voter turnout and vote choice. To strengthen causal identification, we combine an event-study framework with the fact that Norwegians were affected personally to differing degrees by the 22 July 2011 terror attack because of variation in the victims’ municipalities of residence. Our main findings suggest that extreme right-wing terrorism influences party vote intentions and evaluations of political leaders strongly in the short run, as well as party choice in actual elections in the longer run. We document shifts
within
Norway’s left-right political blocs rather than shifts
between
those blocs frequently observed following religious/separatist violence.
Intergroup relations theory posits that cross-group friendship reduces threat perceptions and negative emotions about outgroups. This has been argued to mitigate the negative effects of ethnic ...diversity on generalized trust. Yet, direct tests of this friendship-trust relation, especially including perceptions of threat and negative affect as mediators, have remained rare at the individual level. In this article, we bridge this research gap using representative data from eight European countries (Group-Focused Enmity). We employ structural equation modelling (SEM) to model mediated paths of cross-group friendship on generalized trust via perceptions of threat and negative affect. We find that both the total effect as well as the (mediated) total indirect effect of cross-group friendship on generalized trust are weak when compared with similar paths estimated for prejudice.
A key component of (neo-)functionalist and constructivist approaches to the study of international organizations concerns staff socialization. Existing analyses of how, or indeed whether, staff ...develop more pro-internationalist attitudes over time draw predominantly on cross-sectional data. Yet, such data cannot address (self-)selection issues or capture the inherently temporal nature of attitude change. This article proposes an innovative approach to the study of international socialization using an explicitly longitudinal design. Analysing two waves of a large-scale survey conducted within the European Commission in 2008 and 2014, it examines the beliefs and values of the same individuals over time and exploits exogenous organizational changes to identify causal effects. Furthermore, the article theorizes and assesses specified scope conditions affecting socialization processes. Showing that international institutions do, in fact, influence value acquisition by individual bureaucrats, our results contest the widely held view that international organizations are not a socializing environment. Our analysis also demonstrates that age at entry and gender significantly affect the intensity of such value change.
Many theories in Public Administration and Public Management explicitly relate to changes over time in the attitudes, values, perceptions, and/or motivations of public‐sector employees. Examining ...such theories using (repeated) cross‐sectional datasets may lead to biased inferences and an inability to expose credible causal relationships. As developing individual‐level panel datasets is costly and time‐consuming, this article presents a method to make better use of existing surveys fielded repeatedly among the same respondent pool without individual identifiers. Specifically, it sets out an approach to create a system of unique identifiers using information about respondents' background characteristics available within the original data. The result is a panel dataset that allows tracking (a subset of) individual respondents across time. The article discusses issues of feasibility, credibility as well as ethical considerations. The methodology has further practical value by highlighting data characteristics that can help minimize identifiability of respondents while creating public‐release datasets.
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