Fiscal rules and electoral turnout

Climate and Electoral Turnout in France

It is commonly stated that the climate has an impact on electoral turnout. This article aims to test this proposition that has not been scientifically proved in the French case yet. Using the last five parliamentary elections turnout data and the corresponding climatic data on the voting day, our study shows that rain has a depressing effect on turnout, whereas sunshine and high temperatures in...

”Engineering Electoral Systems to Increase Turnout”

In this paper we propose two mechanisms that can be used as a solution to low participation levels in PR elections. The first tool we propose is an electoral rule where the number of candidates elected depends on the level of participation. The second tool we propose is a participation quorum that has to be met in order for the election to be valid. In both cases we characterize all possible eq...

Does Turnout Decline Matter? Electoral Turnout and Partisan Choice in Britain

In recent years, the decline in election turnout seems to have abated in the United States, (McDonald and Popkin, APSR 2001) but it has been exacerbated in other advanced industrial democracies. For example, voter participation in Britain dropped from 75.3% in 1987 to 59.4% in 2001. While election officials, academics, and pundits in Britain and elsewhere agonize over the causes of the turnout ...

Experimental Evidence about Whether (and Why) Electoral Closeness Affects Turnout

The Electoral Consequences of Large Fiscal Adjustments

The conventional wisdom regarding the political consequences of large reductions of budget de…cits is that they are very costly for the governments which implement them: they are punished by voters at the following elections. In the present paper, instead, we …nd no evidence that governments which quickly reduce budget de…cits are systematically voted out of o¢ ce in a sample of 19 OECD countri...