More Politics than People: What Causes Change to Individual-Level Voter Turnout in Britain

This paper hypothesizes that changes in individual-level voter turnout are caused more by changes in the political context than by the individual’s circumstances. Specifically, I examine the voting history of 10,000 individuals across five general elections in the United Kingdom since 1992. I use a combination of household panel data and constituency and national level political data to perform a multi-level panel data analysis. The data captures the transformation of the British political landscape in the last twenty years by testing processes of individualisation, weakening of traditional allegiances and changes to the party system. As such, the paper gives contemporary insights into the causes of voter turnout that compliment the traditional explanatory models - the resource, psychological, socialisation and mobilisation models - and enhance the political-institutional model.