This paper analyses the determinants of selective participation in direct democratic votes. Previous research shows that the electorate divides itself into frequent voters, abstainers and selective voters. In line with the literature on habitual voting, scholars have mostly focused on the first two groups and have neglected selective participation. Our paper contributes to fill this gap, by studying under what circumstances selective voters turn out. We use validated data on individual turnout from Switzerland covering more than 50 direct democratic votes on the federal level from 1996 to 2013. We estimate two-level models in which we interact individual-level variables (gender, age, civil status, residence duration and citizenship status) with context-level variables, such as the institutional characteristics of the vote (popular initiative or referendums), the policy issue at stake, the level of importance and complexity of the policy proposal, and the intensity of the referendum campaign.
