Voter dropoff in Britain: who, when and why?*
9
The relatively large size of European electoral districts (the whole of London is
a single electoral district) coupled with traditionally lacklustre party political
campaigns for these particular elections is perhaps reflected in the minimal
impact made by political variables.
Turning to the analysis of voter dropoff we consider two aspects of this
– the difference between general and local election turnout, and then local
and European turnout. By using the same set of socioeconomic factors but
with differences in logit transformed turnout as the dependent variable we
hoped to identify any significantly different rates of participation according to
the social characteristics of polling station areas. In fact, for both categories
of voter dropoff the model fit is rather poor (see Table 1). There does not
appear to be evidence in these data of differential turnout according to
socioeconomic status – the difference in turnout is not a function of one
particular group in society failing to participate leading to policy bias towards
those groups that maintain rates of participation.
Table 1 here
Could the difference in turnout be related instead to the perceived
closeness of the electoral race? Using the political measures described
earlier we consider the possible effects on voter dropoff. Compared with the
earlier models it does appear that the political situation does affect differences
in turnout. Both models that include political variables result in 41% of
variance explained – the electoral situation matters.
That said, each of the extended models explain less than half the
variation in the difference in turnout between general and local elections and
between local and European elections. In short, even low-level aggregate
data for polling stations does not allow us to capture the whole story involving
the rather dramatic differences in turnout between general elections on the
one hand and local and European elections on the other.
Convention