Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies since 1945 (review)

This remarkable book repays attention from scholars and policymakers alike. It builds on two or more generations of careful scholarship, but literally takes that work to another level—in this case, another level of analysis. The book is concerned to account for temporal and crossnational variation in aggregate electoral turnout. Although it starts of necessity with research on individual differences, it shows how those differences do not translate by themselves into propositions about aggregates.

Two bodies of existing work are mobilized to mutually supportive effect. One set of propositions is social-psychological, hearkening back to the first generation of survey-based electoral research. The other propositions originate in the rational-choice school. The synthesis of these perspectives is little short of brilliant. The deployment of data is resourceful, ranging from critical single-country cases through a six-country merged-survey analysis to a twenty-two-country aggregate analysis. The translation of findings from more confined analysis to parameters in the more expansive analyses is occasionally heroic but always carefully thought out.

Traditionally, most citizens learn in early adulthood to become regular participants in the election process. But those citizens whose first political decade is marked by consistent non-participation are also likely to continue as they began. As non-voters continue to age, they never attain the turnout levels typical of generations who spent their twenties in a more participative mode. Since the late 1960s, circumstances have taught increasing numbers of citizens to abstain from voting. The lowering of the voting age, for instance, has forced citizens to embark on political learning at the worst possible stage in their development. Franklin argues that the damage is permanent and, indeed, has yet to express its full effect.

The peculiar susceptibility of young voters to participative or nonparticipative learning also interacts with the key aggregate component of turnout variation—the importance of citizens' electoral choice to the larger political order, which has two potentially contradictory components. One is the extent to which an election decides the makeup of the government. In this respect, the relatively defractionalized results of majoritarian systems help turnout. But the other component, which also pertains to majoritarian systems, concerns the extent to which local elections are vulnerable to being noncompetitive. On both counts, and for more than just majoritarian systems, recent decades have seen elections become less compelling events.

The book has its weaknesses. The style is frustratingly allusive. The copyediting is weak, especially on surnames and dates of publication. The integration of individual and cross-level effects is uncomfortably reliant on data from one country, Germany. The denominator in the aggregate turnout calculations is murky; for a book on turnout, this is a critical quantity.

These quibbles should not detract from the main point, however. The book is a welcome relief from cultural explanations that shade into, at best, tedious moralizing and, at worst, millennial despair. Franklin concentrates instead on structural factors that may be manipulable. But he also warns that there is a generational story, born out of the interaction between abiding life-cycle phenomena and historically specific competitive conditions. We have created a political generation that has learned not to participate. Even if we reverse the aggregate trends that are the ultimate cause of turnout decline, restoration of the participative status quo ante will take more than our lifetimes.