Search results for "Turnout"
showing 4 items of 14 documents
Elections, Referendums and Parties
2015
By the end of 2014, the Baltic states had held a total of 19 parliamentary, 19 municipal and 3 cycles of European Parliament elections. Lithuania, which elects its president via a national popular vote, had additionally held six presidential polls. Another 23 referendums have been held since August 1991. The rigidity of the Lithuanian and Latvian electoral and judicial institutions have been tested by the 2004 impeachment of Lithuanian president, Rolandas Paksas, and the subsequent early presidential election, as well as a referendum on the recall of Latvia’s parliament in the summer of 2011 and the following early election. Estonia is recognised as an electoral innovator, being the first s…
Spanish electoral archive. SEA database
2021
This paper introduces the SEA database (acronym for Spanish Electoral Archive). SEA brings together the most complete public repository available to date on Spanish election outcomes. SEA holds all the results recorded from the electoral processes of General (1979–2019), Regional (1989–2021), Local (1979–2019) and European Parliamentary (1987–2019) elections held in Spain since the restoration of democracy in the late 70 s, in addition to other data sets with electoral content. The data are offered for free and is presented in a homogeneous and friendly format. Most of the databases are available for download with data from various electoral levels, including from the ballot box level. This…
How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums
2017
Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switze…
To vote or not to vote? Migrant electoral (dis)engagement in an enlarged Europe
2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. External voting by nonresident citizens has become an important feature of contemporary democratic politics. However, compared to the average voter in domestic elections, we still know significantly less about migrants’ motivations to vote or not. Whereas analyses of external voting patterns offer insights into the results of external voting compared to origin populations, there is a lacuna of knowledge about why migran…