Democratic maturity, external efficacy, and participation in elections: towards macro-micro interaction

Authors

  • Michal Nový Masaryk University
  • Tomáš Katrňák Masaryk University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.274.vol44iss3

Keywords:

Voter turnout, democratic maturity, external efficacy, multilevel modeling, cross-level interaction

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the age of a democracy matters when explaining voter turnout. It proposes that democratic maturity might influence the probability of casting a ballot not only directly, but at the same time, as an amplifier of the effects of individual-level predictors of voting. From an array of variables that might be responsible for raising or lowering one’s probability of voting, this study emphasizes that the impact of a sense of external efficacy can be contingent on the different levels of democratic age. Theoretically, the ties between democratic maturity and external efficacy in turnout explanation follow from aspects of political socialization process. We hypothesize that the higher the democratic age, the higher the positive effect of external efficacy on participation in elections. This supposition is tested through an empirical analysis based on survey data from the third module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). In total, the dataset comprises 34,440 respondents nested in 27 countries. Multilevel logistic regression that includes cross-level interaction is employed to estimate the effects of the variables of interest on self-reported turnout.

Author Biographies

  • Michal Nový, Masaryk University

    Michal Nový (*1988) works as a researcher at the International Institute of Political Science, Masaryk University. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Masaryk University and an M.Sc. in Regional Development from Mendel University in Brno. His research focuses on political behavior and public administration. 

  • Tomáš Katrňák, Masaryk University

    Tomáš Katrňák (*1973) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. His research interests are social stratification, class analysis, marriage market, social statistics and categorical data analysis.

Downloads

Published

2015-08-11

Issue

Vol. 44 No. 3 (2015): Open Issue

Section

Research Article

License

The OZP is the authorized quarterly publication of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft (ÖGPW, Austrian Political Science Association)

The author of an article (in case of multiple authors: the corresponding author, responsible for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors) accepted to be published in the OZP hereby acknowledges the following Copyright Notice:

  1. The author retains the copyright to the article.
  2. It is the responsibility of the author, not of the OZP, to obtain permission to use any previously published and/or copyrighted material.
  3. Publication of a submitted text is dependent on positive results from the peer reviewing. In such a case, the OZP editors have the right to publish the text.
  4. In case of publication, the article will be assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) number.
  5. The author agrees to abide by an open access Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY nc) license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article in any non-commercial way, so long as appropriate credit is given to the author and source of the work. 
  6. The license ensures that the author’s article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. In order to facilitate distribution, the author agrees that the article, once published, will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the OZP.
  7. In addition, the author is encouraged to self-archive the article, once published, with reference to the place of the first publication.
  8. After the contribution appears in the OZP, it is still possible to publish it elsewhere with reference to the place of the first publication.
  9. The finished article, if published, will include a correspondence address (both postal and email) of the author.
  10. If written under the auspices of a grant from one or more funding agencies, such as FWF (Austrian Science Fund), ERC (European Research Council), and Horizon 2020 (EU Framework Programme), an article accepted for publication has to be deposited in an Open Access archive. The OZP’s archiving policy is compliant with these provisions. (In case the article derives on funding from a different source, the author is responsible to check compliance of provisions.)