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 decline, it is important to examine the political consequences of lower levels of turnout in these settings. In this paper, I simulate the effects of varying levels of turnout on partisan outcomes in the 2001 British election based on five different models. The results suggest that Labour would have won under almost any conceivable level of turnout (higher or lower), and the order of finish among the major parties would not have been affected. These findings raise further doubts about the conventional wisdom that higher turnout helps parties of the left.