Mind the gap, please! Pinpointing the influence of municipal size on local electoral participation

ABSTRACT

Turnout rates vary between local and national elections. This paper promotes the national–local turnout gap as the best way to pinpoint the local component of voting at local elections. By analysing the national–local turnout gap instead of the raw local turnout rate, one can reduce the potential bias originating from the differences in socio-demographic composition and civic skills existing between municipalities of various sizes. Including data from 12 countries and almost 15,000 municipalities, it is demonstrated that a clear and consistent relationship between municipal size and local turnout exists: the larger the municipality the fewer eligible voters turn out at local elections (compared to national elections).

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal size
• size and democracy
• local elections
• electoral participation
• voter turnout
• national–local turnout gap

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. There is also a stream of literature arguing that in the metropolitan areas it is not the size itself, but the concentration of residents and administrative fragmentation that play the crucial role in explaining political participation (Kelleher and Lowery 2009).

2. Other approaches are possible: instead of the previous parliamentary elections, one can use the closest elections, or an interpolation based on the previous and subsequent elections.

3. In all the countries included in the analyses, it has been possible to obtain turnout for national elections disaggregated per municipalities making a comparison of the national and local turnout possible. This is of course a prerequisite for calculating the national-local turnout gap and has therefore been a part of the sampling strategy for this article.

4. Different eligibility rules influence the size of the electorate (number of eligible voters), i.e. the denominator of the turnout rate. In all the countries studied, eligibility rules for local elections are more liberal than in national elections and local electorates usually incorporate some of the non-citizens. For example, in all EU countries, EU citizens are entitled to vote in the local elections in the country of their current residence. In some countries, this principle refers also to long-term residents. In the German Land of Nordrhein-Westfalen voting age for local elections was lowered to 16 in 1998.

5. Regressing the national–local turnout gap on the (log₁₀) number of eligible voters in the parliamentary election (or on the average size of the electorate) yields very similar conclusions.

6. This is a measure of peripherality while the ‘historic regions’ in Poland are rather measures of state traditions.

7. There is a discrepancy in terms of electoral cycle between the cross-national comparison (in Table 2) and the model with controls (in Table 3) due to data availability.

8. The distance was computed as a straight line between the centroids of the local government units. In the case of Poland, we also tested the alternative measure of peripheral location – distance to one of the regional capitals. The results were similar; yet, for the sake of comparability of the models, we retained the distance to Warsaw.

9. The variable related to the council elections reports the share of uncontested seats in the council (i.e. only one candidate stood for one seat). The variable related to the direct mayoral elections is a dummy (equals 1 if the mayoral election was uncontested).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministerstwo Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego ‘Mobility Plus’ grant 1665/MOB/V/2017/0.

Notes on contributors

Adam Gendźwiłł

Adam Gendźwiłł is an assistant professor of political science and human geography in the Department of Local Development and Policy at the University of Warsaw. His research interests comprise local elections, political representation, and territorial reforms. He has published recently in Local Government Studies, Politics & Gender, Regional & Federal Studies, and Space & Polity.

Ulrik Kjaer

Ulrik Kjaer is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include political recruitment, political leadership and local elections. His work has been published in journals such as Local Government Studies, State and Local Government Review, Regional & Federal Studies and Urban Affairs Review.