Modeling and Forecasting Electoral Participation around the World: Voter Turnout in Democratic Regimes, 1972-2006 [DRAFT—please do not cite without the authors ’ permission]

Dobrzynska for making their data available to us. Ever since Rose (1980) and Powell (1982), electoral participation has been considered a highly important area of political research as an indication of the health of a democracy. For this reason, facilitating voting participation is an important goal in society. This paper builds on relatively recent cross regional work by André Blais and colleagues to examine more closely how well models of turnout perform in predicting turnout out-of-sample, which we argue is an important goal of social science (e.g., Blais 2006, Blais an