Neoinstitutional accounts of voter turnout: moving beyond industrial democracies

This paper tests two neo-institutional explanations of voter turnout using data from new democracies. The first part of the paper deals with institutions as "political arenas" - rules and procedures that structure voters' choices. The second part of the paper explores the role of political organizations as agents of mobilization. The effectiveness of the registration process, compulsory voting, and party competition - more than any other institutional arrangement - account for voter turnout during transitions to democracy. To deal with traditional measurement problems, the paper develops an index of party competition for multiparty systems. Multiple regression (OLS and biweight robust regression) is applied to a sample of 17 Latin American countries in the 1980s. The results suggest that the state and political parties have a key role as agents of mobilization in new democracies