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ABSTRACT
While scholars have shed light on our understanding of elections in less and non-democratic countries, the incentives behind electoral participation in these countries remain unexplored. This paper sets out to investigate how regime structure is associated with voters' incentives of habitual voting. We assert that the formation of voting habits is associated with the relationships of citizens with the state and their expectations about it. Thus, habitual voting reflects voters' understandings about, perceptions of, and concerns with their political environment and system. In democracy, habituated voting behavior is strongly associated with respondents' support for the regime because their sense of civic duty encourages them to vote. In authoritarian regimes, knowing that their ballots are the adornments of the authoritarian government, habitual voting simply reveals citizens' short-term support for the government or their concerns with the vertical accountability of the government. We further test the hypotheses against Asian Barometer Survey data and the analysis evidences our assumptions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Snyder, “Beyond Electoral Authoritarianism”; Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm.”
2 Pastor and Tan, “The Meaning of China’s Village Elections”; Geddes, “The Role of Elections in Authoritarian Regimes.”
3 Landry, Davis, and Wang, “Elections in Rural China.”
4 The turnout rate in China comes from He, “A Survey Study of Voting Behavior,” 231.
5 Geddes, “The Role of Elections in Authoritarian Regimes,” 4; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy, 4; Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR.
6 Gandhi and Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism,” 415.
7 O’Brien and Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State.”
8 Manion, “Chinese Democratization in Perspective.”
9 Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China.”
10 O’Brien, and Han, “Path to Democracy?”
11 He and Thøgersen, “Giving the People a Voice?”
12 Powell, “American Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective”; Norris, Electoral Engineering; Radcliff and Davis, “Labor Organization and Electoral Participation”; Gray and Caul, “Declining Voter Turnout”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices, 173–177; Franklin, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics.
13 Andrews, “Habit”; Aldrich, Montgomery, and Wood, “Turnout as a Habit,” 536.
14 Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269; Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” 21.
15 O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies”; Schedler, “Conceptualizing Accountability.”
16 Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes”; Schedler, “Electoral Authoritarianism.”
17 Schedler, Diamond, and Plattner, The Self-Restraining State, 2
18 Schedler, “Electoral Authoritarianism,” 5.
19 Zakaria, The Future of Freedom, 93.
20 Schedler, “Electoral Authoritarianism,” 4.
21 Beaulieu and Hyde, “In the Shadow of Democracy Promotion.”
22 Ames, “Bases of Support for Mexico’s Dominant Party”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
23 Cox, “Authoritarian Elections and Leadership Succession.”
24 Waterbury, “Fortuitous Byproducts”; Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, 13.
25 Case, Executive Accountability in Southeast Asia, 9.
26 In the 2013 Malaysia general election, the opposition People’s Pact even won a majority of votes (50.87%), but only got 40% of seats. Similarly, in the 2011 Singaporean general election, the opposition parties garnered 40% of the total votes, but won only six out of 87 seats. See Tan, “Manipulating Electoral Laws in Singapore.”
27 Schedler, “Electoral Authoritarianism”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Magaloni and Kricheli, “Political Order and One-Party Rule,” 124. See Case, “UMNO Paramountcy.”
28 Malesky and Schuler, “The Single-Party Dictator’s Dilemma.”
29 McCormick, Political Reform in Post-Mao China, 134–135; Gainsborough, “Party Control,” 60.
30 Similarly, in Vietnam, despite the decentralization of the candidate nomination procedure, elections remain under the Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) control. Candidate nomination takes place at the provincial level and is regulated by an electoral committee, which is staffed by party and government leaders in the provinces. See Ibid., 60.
31 Landry, Davis, and Wang, “Elections in Rural China,” 764; Gainsborough, “Party Control,” 60; Malesky and Schuler, “The Single-Party Dictator’s Dilemma.”
32 Kuan and Lau, “Traditional Orientations and Political Participation,” 300; Gainsborough, “Party Control”; Malesky and Schuler, “The Single-Party Dictator’s Dilemma.”
33 Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism”; Magaloni and Kricheli, “Political Order and One-Party Rule.”
34 Gandhi and Przeworski, “Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion.”
35 Gandhi and Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism.”
36 Ibid.; Geddes, “The Role of Elections in Authoritarian Regimes”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Malesky and Schuler, “The Single-Party Dictator’s Dilemma”; Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China.”
37 Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience”; O’Brien and Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State”; O’Brien, “Understanding China’s Grassroots Elections.”
38 Przeworski, Democracy and the Market, 24–36; Przeworski, “Democracy as an Equilibrium”; Weingast, “The Political Foundations of Democracy.”
39 Flickinger and Studlar, “The Disappearing Voters?,” 12.
40 Blais, To Vote or Not to Vote, 93–94; Riker and Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting.”
41 Loewen and Dawes, “The Heritability of Duty and Voter Turnout”; Güth and Hannelore, “Do People Care About Democracy?”; Okada, “Do You Remember Whether You Participated.”
42 O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies,” 29.
43 Reyes, “History and Context of the Development,” 337–338.
44 Case, Executive Accountability in Southeast Asia.
45 Gunther and Hwa, “Public Perceptions of Television Influence.”
46 Gomez, “Online Opposition in Singapore.”
47 Kelliher, “The Chinese Debate Over Village Self-Government”; McCormick, Political Reform in Post-Mao China, 135.
48 McCormick, “Political Change in China and Vietnam,” 135.
49 Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China,” 1124; Gilison, “Soviet Elections as a Measure of Dissent”; Karklins, “Soviet Elections Revisited”; Roeder, “Electoral Avoidance in the Soviet Union.”
50 Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes”; and Case, Executive Accountability in Southeast Asia.
51 For example, Landry, Davis, and Wang, “Elections in Rural China”; Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China.”
52 The classification is introduced from Fowler, “Habitual Voting and Behavioral Turnout.”
53 Easton, A System Analysis of Political Life.
54 Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, 63; Easton, “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support,” 444.
55 O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies,” 29.
56 Schedler, “Conceptualizing Accountability.”
57 Theiss-Morse and Hibbing, “Citizenship and Civic Engagement,” 230.
58 Kuan and Lau, “Traditional Orientations and Political Participation.”
59 Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China.”
60 Landry, Davis, and Wang, “Elections in Rural China.”
61 For example, Finkel, “Reciprocal Effects of Participation and Political Efficacy”; “The Effects of Participation on Political Efficacy”; Campbell et al., The American Voter, Ch. 5; Valentino, Gregorwiez, and Groenedyk, “Efficacy, Emotions and the Habit of Participation.”
62 Powell, “American Voter Turnout in Comparative Perspective.”
63 Blais, To Vote or Not to Vote; Campbell, Why We Vote.
64 Okada, “Do You Remember Whether You Participated.”
65 Data Sources: Taiwan Elections and Democratization Survey 2012; and Achen and Hur, “Civic Duty and Voter Turnout”; Okada, “Do You Remember Whether You Participated.”
66 Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR, 116–118.
67 O’Brien and Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State”; O’Brien, “Understanding China’s Grassroots Elections”; Shi, “Voting and Nonvoting in China.”
68 For example, Landry, Davis and Wang, “Elections in Rural China”; Zhong and Chen, “To Vote or Not To Vote.”
69 Gandhi and Przeworski, “Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion,” 21; Gandhi and Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism”; McCormick, “Political Change in China and Vietnam.”
70 Chang, Welsh, Chu, “Southeast Asia”; Chu, “Sources of Regime Legitimacy”; Tong, “Morality, Benevolence, and Responsibility”; and Bell, China’s New Confucianism.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alex Chuan-hsien Chang
Alex Chuan-hsien Chang is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica at Taipei City, Taiwan.