Candidate-Centered Electoral Systems and Voter Turnout

Previous studies have suggested that candidate-centredness can both stimulate and depress voter turnout. The main hypothesis in this study is that turnout is lower in candidate-centred electoral systems, primarily in open-list proportional representation systems with preference voting. Based on arguments in the literature, turnout should be lower because collective mobilisation efforts of parties are less efficient in candidate-centred systems and cognitive requirements on voters are higher. This study takes a cross-national comparative approach to assess how electoral systems that create incentives to cultivate a personal vote affect national-level voter turnout. Five types of electoral systems are distinguished: open-list PR, ordered-list PR, closed-list PR, majoritarian and mixed systems. Cross-sectional time-series data from 36 democracies (OECD and Central and Eastern European countries) between 1990 and 2014 are used to test the competing assumptions made about the impact of the personal vote on turnout. The results show that turnout is the lowest in candidate-centred open-list PR systems and the highest in party-centred closed- and ordered-list PR systems, while controlling for a host of contextual factors that have been linked to aggregate turnout. In addition, the finding that candidate-centredness is negatively related to turnout holds up even when taking into account district magnitude, electoral disproportionality and effective number of parties.