Understanding voter fatigue

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the past half-century, liberal democracies have considerably expanded opportunities for citizen participation, calling on citizens to vote and make choices in a growing number of popular votes. According to some currents in political theory, these institutional developments should lead to a surge in citizen engagement. This presentation challenges these theoretical expectations and subjects them to an empirical test. It outlines a multi-year research agenda investigating the impact of rising election frequency on electoral participation. After briefly reviewing my prior theorising and key findings, I introduce a new paper that explores the sources of voter fatigue. The study hypothesizes that frequent elections make electoral abstention more acceptable to citizens. The main hypothesis is tested via an original pre-registered survey experiment fielded in five countries with a total sample size of 12,221 respondents. The results offer pioneering evidence on the psychological effects of election frequency. They confirm that high election frequency increases the social acceptability of electoral abstention and that this effect is proportional to the number of past elections. It can be equally observed among all major social groups, including politically interested citizens and those who believe that voting is a civic duty. These findings hold major implications for our understanding of voter turnout, democratic citizenship, and democratic institutional engineering.