Voter Turnout and its Determinants in Old and New European Democracies.

Voter Turnout and its Determinants in Old and New European Democracies. Despite more than twenty years of freedom is voter turnout in successfully democratized post-communist countries far below the average of West European Democracies. In this study, I try to show that the role of national context is crucial for strengthening or inhibiting voting participation. This article handles with two macro-theories, societal modernization theory and institutionalism. These ordinary approaches generally assume that more advanced communities offering stronger positive institutional incentives will have higher rate of political involvement. Based on these theories, nine possible determinants which can affect turnout were chosen human development, non-agrarian population, urbanization, parliamentarism, direct vote of the president, closeness, electoral system proportionality, population size and compulsory voting. Moreover, my study supplements classical theories with factor of postcommunism. It emphasizes that communist legacy per se brings important condition for (non-)participation. The principal objective of this article is to trace the importance of postcommunism compared with other factors which can cause differences in aggregate voter participation among European democracies and to demonstrate that postcommunism works as some kind of condition for certain factors it can change their intensity and direction. I examine turnout in 213 national lower house elections held in 36 European countries. Regression analysis enriched by interaction effects is used to estimate the explanatory model. Sociologia 2013, Vol. 45 (No. 2: 195-228)