Correlates of Voter Turnout

Abstract

Despite decades of research, there is no consensus as to the core correlates of national-level voter turnout. We argue that this is, in part, due to the lack of comprehensive, systematic empirical analysis. This paper conducts such an analysis. We identify 44 articles on turnout from 1986 to 2017. These articles include over 127 potential predictors of voter turnout, and we collect data on seventy of these variables. Using extreme bounds analysis, we run over 15 million regressions to determine which of these 70 variables are robustly associated with voter turnout in 579 elections in 80 democracies from 1945 to 2014. Overall, 22 variables are robustly associated with voter turnout, including compulsory voting, concurrent elections, competitive elections, inflation, previous turnout, and economic globalization.