Can PR Voting Serve as a Shelter Against Declining Turnout? Evidence from Swiss Municipal Elections
| Author | Andreas Ladner,Henry Milner |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512106058633 |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Can PR Voting Serve as a Shelter Against Declining
Turnout? Evidence from Swiss Municipal Elections
HENRY MILNER AND ANDREAS LADNER
ABSTRACT. To assess the impact of electoral systems on voting turnout,
cross-national studies can be usefully complemented by studies of
turnout in local elections in countries using more than one electoral
system at that level. In this article, we look at data from a 1998 survey of
Swiss municipalities to revisit the findings of our earlier study. This
previous study, based on a 1988 survey, concluded, in particular, that
there exists a positive relationship between proportional representation
elections, party politicization, and voter turnout. The moment is oppor-
tune since, in the interval, turnout has markedly declined in Swiss
municipalities, as elsewhere. By testing whether municipalities with
proportional representation voting were more or less successful in
stemming the decline, we learn more about the relationship among
these three phenomena. We use the results for those Swiss municipalities
which participated in both surveys as our primary source.
Keywords: • Local political parties • Municipalities • Participation
• Proportional representation voting • Voting system • Voting turnout
Introduction
In this article we seek to contribute further to the debates over the effects that
electoral systems have on voter turnout. Blais and Carty (1990) in their analysis of
509 elections in 20 countries, for example, come to the conclusion that turnout
rates in proportional representation (PR) systems are definitely higher than in
plurality or majority systems and that the average positive impact lies somewhere
between 5 percent and 7 percent. Arend Lijphart (1997) in his 1996 presidential
address to the American Political Science Association summarizing the com-
parative literature, arrived at an even higher estimated turnout boost of 9–12
percent due to PR. Furthermore, a somewhat similar estimate is offered by
Franklin, who calculates that there is a boost of 0.6 percent in turnout for every
International Political Science Review (2006), Vol 27, No. 1, 29–45
DOI: 10.1177/0192512106058633 © 2006 International Political Science Association
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
percent by which the distribution of seats in the legislature approaches
proportionality with the distribution of votes (1996: 226).1However, there are also
authors (for example, Crewe, 1981) who question the existence of the positive
effect of PR on turnout.
Our own analysis of turnout in Swiss local elections, on balance, supports
findings that PR has a positive impact on turnout – a relationship most clearly
manifested in the smaller municipalities (Ladner and Milner, 1999). In this article,
we would like to address the question of whether PR serves as a shelter against
turnout decline as it has been experienced in most countries and across all levels
(see, for example, EU, 2000; Wattenberg, 1998). In doing so, we hope to shed
light on the still insufficiently understood mechanisms underlying the relationship
between electoral institutions and voter turnout. It will allow us to probe more
deeply into the suggestion made at the end of our earlier study, namely, that to the
extent that PR has a direct, positive effect on turnout, it is due not only to its
making more individual votes count toward the outcomes, but also, indirectly, to
its being conducive to a more politically informed citizenry. If this is the case,
citizens under PR could be expected to be less affected by the processes of
decreasing interest in conventional politics, which is usually blamed for the
decline in participation. Accordingly, we should find electoral turnout to have
declined less under PR. If, however, no difference is to be found, turnout decline
should be viewed as a phenomenon outside the reach of electoral institutions;
whereas, should we find a higher turnout decrease in PR systems, it would point
toward elements which fostered higher participation in PR systems in the first
place losing their mobilizing capacity in the context of changing citizen attitudes
toward politics.
As in our first study (Ladner and Milner, 1999), we are able to diminish the
problems inherent in cross-national comparisons, namely, that higher average
turnout under a given type of institutional arrangement may be due to aspects of
national political cultures that favor such arrangements, by analyzing turnout in
subunits in the same country. It is admittedly difficult to find countries which have
both significant institutional variation in local electoral systems and sufficiently
differentiated data. Along with Switzerland, only Australia serves this purpose, but
Australian data are limited in their applicability by the use of compulsory voting in
local elections in the most populous states. In Switzerland, voting is not compul-
sory and there are a large number of municipalities using both majority and
proportional local electoral systems. Since there are no official statistics
assembling turnout rates in local elections and providing systematic information
about municipal electoral institutions in Switzerland, we have to rely on data
stemming from nationwide surveys in 1988, 1994, and 1998. Our analyses
therefore only cover municipalities that provided the necessary data in the
corresponding surveys, hence the number of municipalities varies slightly
depending on the variables included. Fortunately, as the Appendix sets out,
participation in the surveys was impressively high.2
This article first gives an insight into the electoral systems used in Swiss
municipalities and, using data from 1988, shows to what extent PR influenced
turnout. We then look at turnout decline in the time between 1988 and 1998 and
its relationship to the voting system. This is followed by an analysis of certain
intervening factors, most notably, the presence or absence of political parties, in
an effort to explain the relationship.
30 International Political Science Review 27(1)
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