Political Interest and Voter Turnout: A Different Relationship in West- and Eastern-Europe

Abstract

Since equal participation is considered to be of central importance in democracies, a large amount of scholarly attention has been given to determinants of voter turnout. However, on the other hand, surprisingly few scholars have looked so far at how the relationships of these determinants with voter turnout differs across regions. Yet, one of these few studies, comparing post-communist Eastern-Europe to Western-Europe, has found the relationship between political interest and voter turnout to be stronger in Western-Europe than in Eastern-Europe. Based on this finding, this study has tried to find an explanation for this phenomena: why does this relationship differ across these regions? Two explanations were examined: differences in levels of party identification and political trust. In this paper, evidence was found that the different relationship of political interest with voter turnout between the East and West of Europe can partly be explained by different levels of political trust whereas party identification does not play a role.