Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The structural decline in voter turnout poses a key issue for democratic countries, and is widely recognised in the literature discourse as the prime element of a wider phenomenon: declining civic engagement [Putnam, 1994] [Lijphart, 1997] [Franklin, 2004]. If low levels of electoral participation constitute the prime symptom of the malaise, a high degree of turnout disproportionality across social strata might entail its exacerbation, leading to political inequality among citizens [Dahl, 2006] [Solt, 2008] [Przeworski, 2015] [Dassonneville and Hooghe, 2016]. Following the considerable body of work addressing the roots of turnout disproportionality, this paper enquires on the influence exerted by economic and social inequality. Beyond the existence of a causal relationship, we seek to identify which social groups exhibit disproportionately low turnout rates. To do so, we perform an econometric cohort analysis along the economic, demographic, occupational, and ethnoracial spectra, relying on Round 7 [2014] of the European Social Survey. We employ Linear Probability Model and Probit regressions to gauge the impact of cohort membership on voting likelihood, across 21 European countries. Our findings suggest that young individuals constitute the cohort that exhibits disproportionately low voting turnout. We find that such an effect is magnified by the lack of engagement in education or paid work at an overall level, and by a majority/non-immigrant ethnoracial background when controlling for national cleavages. The establishment of a relationship between socio-economic inequalities and low voter turnout might constitute a first step in exploring the interplay between the former inequalities and their political sibling, which is yet a relatively uncharted field.