Who Votes? Implications for New Democracies

As a feature of democracy’s current ascendancy, competitive elections have become the main means of choosing governments around the world. In emergent democracies – located in countries that have recently introduced or restored civil liberties and competitive elections – ordinary people enjoy unprecedented opportunities to vote for their preferred leaders. They are able to make free choices at the polls for the first time in a generation or even, as with black South Africans, to vote for the first time in their lives. This article addresses prospective “causes ” and “consequences ” of voter turnout in new democracies. It describes the social profiles of national electorates, appraises which demographic characteristics matter most for turnout, and assesses whether electoral participation by novice voters helps emergent democracies take root. To our knowledge, it is the first effort to account for voter participation across all major regions of the global South. We recognize that other, mainly institutional, factors – such as compulsory voting, competitive contests, or concurrent presidential and parliamentary polls – have powerful effects on turnout. Even taking electoral institutions into account, however, we discover basic demographic patterns – centering on the age of voters, their residential location, and their level of education