Turnout decline in Western Europe: apathy or alienation?

What is driving the general decline of voter turnout in established democracies in the 21st century? In this study, I develop a holistic framework that incorporates explanations on the aggregate and individual levels, as well as the broader literature on democratic developments hitherto largely ignored in studies of turnout decline. I argue that there is an important, overarching debate within this literature that has yet to be tested longitudinal, cross-country analyses of changing political behaviour: that between political apathy on one hand and political alienation on the other. In other words: are modern citizens voting less than earlier electorates because they are simply less interested in politics or because they are still interested but instead alienated from the specific type of formal politics dominant in today’s democracies? To what extent are these dynamics particular to particular generations of citizens coming of age and what is the role of citizens’ changing education levels? In order to provide answers to these questions, I conduct multilevel logistics regression models and age-period-cohort (APC) analyses on an extensive new dataset, consisting of over 250.000 respondents from 121 national election studies conducted in eleven Western European countries in the period between 1956-2017 and merged specifically for the purposes of this study. I present descriptive data for various measures of turnout, apathy and alienation in all of these countries before focusing in on the four “turnout decline countries” (TDC), where the available survey data reflects a gradual trend of turnout decline, and comparing dynamics in these countries with the rest of the countries in this study. The results suggest that political apathy has in fact been declining across the region, while alienation has been rising substantially. However, the negative effect of apathy on turnout has become much stronger: apathetic citizens today are much less likely to vote than apathetic citizens in the past. This development accounts for most of turnout decline in the TDC and is significantly stronger there than in the other group of countries. Furthermore, I find that this effect is largely (but not entirely) particular to younger generations of citizens, but there is also a growing education gap in turnout that these dynamics do not fully explain. These results have important implications for studies of turnout decline and broader democratic developments, as well as for public policy in the fields of citizenship and participation – and for anyone interested in re-engaging citizens with their democratic systems