Voter abstention and the socioeconomic characteristics of its electorate

: Portuguese case study

Abstract

Voting can be interpreted as the means to express our opinions and beliefs to our government, and an opportunity to be heard and to fight for a change. The continuous increase of the abstention rate can be understood as an increasing lack of interest in the political environment or even a lack of trust or self­identification with the options available. The goal of this study is to understand which socioeconomic variables are contributing to the Portuguese abstention rate, considering different types of elections, and differences at the municipalitylevel. For the empirical analysis, it was used data from PORDATA at the municipal level and for the 8 elections between 2009 and 2019. An OLS regression was performed with year and municipality fixed effects, for different types of elections, namely the parliament, municipal, presidential and the European parliament elections. The results showed that the drivers of the abstention rate are different by type of election. For the parliament elections, an increase in the percentage of votes in non­center political parties and in the number of registered crimes lead to higher abstention rates, while an increase in the average monthly earnings of employees and in the percentage of elderly population lead to lower abstention rates. Interestingly, however, different types of elections provide different results. For the municipal elections, a decrease in the population density leads to higher abstention rates. In the Presidential and European elections, different variables showed significant in the determination of the abstention rate.

Date of Award	25 Jan 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Hugo Reis (Supervisor)