Repeated non-participation in lithuanian parliamentary elections: problem or protest?

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis – to find out whether the repeated non-participation in Lithuanian parliamentary elections by its citizens is a problem or a form of protest. To achieve this it is necessary to accomplish several tasks – find several broader groups of reasons, into which several simpler reasons can be assigned, then, using post-election surveys from the 2012 and 2016 parliamentary elections and statistical analysis, find which groups are relevant and to what degree. Using said results, make conclusions and answer the main question: problem or protest? The paper is comprised of two main sections – Theory and Analysis, both of which are further subdivided into smaller sections. In Theory, first is the overview of main literature, in which the literature that was read to form the theory that is the basis of the whole thesis is laid out and explained. In Reason Groups, using the previously mentioned literature and the theory that comes from it four reason groups are formed: rational reasons, reasons of social environment, reasons stemming from a lack of political education and reasons related to age. In the last part of Theory, hypotheses are raised, the proving or disproving of which will help answer the main question of the thesis. Analysis is the main and longest part of the paper, in which a simple data analysis and statistical data analysis is carried out, as well as comparative analysis. In simple data analysis select questions are picked from the surveys, based on Theory literature, and each one of those questions is analysed by frequencies, to understand what the difference between every participant of the survey and the participants, who repeatedly did not participate in parliamentary elections. These separate data sets are also assigned to reason groups. In the statistical data analysis section, using the Chi-square criteria a secondary quantitative data analysis is carried out and by using the subsequent results and comparing them together it was found that when ordered by importance and significance the reason groups look like this: reasons stemming from a lack of political education, reasons related to age, reasons of social environment and rational reasons. Even though the degree of correlation was not very large, very small in some cases, at the end of the analysis it was still found how much the reason groups correlate with repeated non-participation in Lithuanian parliamentary elections. Using all those partial conclusions one final conclusion can be made: since the main reason group is the reasons stemming from lack of political education group, it seems evident, that repeated non-participation is not a form of protest, but an electorate problem that can repeat itself in the 2020 parliamentary elections, if they are not cancelled