political scale and electoral turnout: evidence from the less industrialized world

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Karen L. RemmerIndustrialized World

Political Scale and Electoral Turnout: Evidence From the Less

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Comparative Political Studies43(3) 275 –303© 2010 SAGE PublicationsDOI: 10.1177/0010414009352638http://cps.sagepub.com

Political Scale and Electoral Turnout: Evidence From the Less Industrialized World

Karen L. Remmer1

Abstract

This article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics. Explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world, it explores the impact of variations in community size relative to other influences on citizen participation. The findings, which draw on both aggregate and individual-level data at the subnational level of analysis, offer considerable evidence that electoral participation declines with community size, but for reasons largely neglected by most prior literature on electoral turnout. The central theoretical conclusion is that future com-parative research needs to address the role of political scale more directly and systematically.

Keywords

electoral turnout, clientelism, political scale, Latin American politics, Costa Rica

For ancient as well as Enlightenment philosophers, the possibility of republi-can governance was seen to resolve around political scale. In Book V of the Laws, Plato calculated that the best practicable state would be limited to 5,040 citizens. Although less precise, Aristotle (Book VII) was equally preoccupied

1Duke University, Durham, NC

Corresponding Author:Karen L. Remmer, Duke University, Department of Political Science, Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708Email: [email protected]

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276 Comparative Political Studies 43(3)

with size: “First among the materials required by the statesman is population: he will consider what should be the number and character of the citizens, and then what should be the size and character of the country.” The same concern guided the writings of early democratic theorists, including Montesquieu and Rousseau, both of whom regarded a small population as a prerequisite for effective citizen participation. Although these conceptions continue to rever-berate in the normative literature on democracy, the tradition of exploring the consequences of political scale has largely disappeared from contemporary political analysis, arguably impoverishing our understanding of democratic governance.

This article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics. Explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turn-out, it asks, how does political scale shape incentives and opportunities for democratic political participation? Is citizen participation most likely to be maximized within small political units? What is the significance of political scale relative to the individual characteristics of citizens, the level of politi-cal competition, or other influences on participation? Drawing on both aggregate and individual-level data on turnout, the study offers significant evidence that electoral participation varies negatively with the size of the community in which voters are casting their ballots, irrespective of the prob-ability that their vote will be pivotal.

Prior ResearchThe comparative literature on electoral participation has drawn on two major traditions of research. The first, closely identified with the pioneering work of Verba, Nie, and Kim (1978), attempts to understand variations in partici-pation on the basis of individual-level data. The central findings of this body of research relate turnout to the socioeconomic characteristics of individuals, including age, education, income, gender, occupation, marital status, employ-ment status, and residence; political attitudes such as trust, political efficacy, political system support, partisan identification, citizenship duty, and interest in politics; and political information, associational activity, church member-ship, and political involvement. The extensive literature includes Wolfinger and Rosenstone (1980), Abramson and Aldrich (1982), Leighley and Nagler (1992), Verba, Schlozman, Brady, and Nie (1993), Brady, Verba, and Schloz-man (1995), Matsusaka and Palda (1999), Blais (2000), Klesner and Lawson (2001), Moon (1992), Matsusaka and Palda (1993), Clarke, Sanders, Stewart, and Whiteley (2004), and Larcinese (2007).

The second major research tradition draws on aggregate-level evidence to explore institutional influences on electoral participation. Inter alia, the



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findings of this second body of literature link turnout with democratic sys-tem age, electoral institutions, party system characteristics, and electoral competitiveness. A seminal contribution by G. B. Powell (1986) showed that variations in electoral participation across 20 industrial democracies during the 1960s and 1970s mainly reflected registration requirements, electoral laws creating nationally competitive districts, and patterns of linkage between parties and social groups. Similarly, Jackman (1987) and Jackman and Miller (1995) provide evidence that turnout in wealthy democracies revolves around five institutional variables: nationally competitive districts, multipar-tyism, electoral disproportionality, unicameralism, and compulsory voting.

Efforts to extend this theoretical framework to other regions of the world have resulted in highly varied findings. Blais and Dobrzynska’s (1998) broad study of 324 lower house elections in 91 democracies reinforces the impor-tance of compulsory voting, electoral laws, disproportionality, competitiveness, and multipartyism but also shows that the socioeconomic environment sig-nificantly influences turnout. López Pintor and Gratschew’s (2002) global study reaches relatively similar conclusions. In their exploration of turnout in 400 legislative elections around the world from 1972 until 2001, Endersby and Krieckhaus (2006), on the other hand, argue that the impact of political institutions is highly variable. Controlling for a variety of potential socioeco-nomic determinants of voting as well as the level of political freedom and compulsory voting, they conclude that electoral institutions have a signifi-cant impact on turnout in well-established democracies but relatively little effect in others. Studies focused on particular regional contexts, including Latin America (Fornos, Power, & Garand, 2004; Lehoucq & Wall, 2004; Pérez-Liñán, 2001), sub-Saharan Africa (Kuenzi & Lambright, 2007), post-communist Europe (Kostadinova, 2003), and the United States (e.g., Caldeira, Patterson, & Markko, 1985; Cox & Munger, 1989; Holbrook & McClurg, 2005; Patterson and Caldeira, 1983; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993), have pro-duced equally distinctive sets of findings.

The sheer disparity of results among studies points to the failure of macro-level research to generate much cumulative knowledge about turnout. Drawing on relatively small samples, differing sets of observations, divergent opera-tionalizations of turnout, and a wide array of theoretical models, the literature has mainly converged around relatively commonsensical observations, for example, abstention is less likely where voting is compulsory and/or registra-tion requirements less onerous. Interactions among electoral institutions, party system fragmentation, and competitiveness add to the obstacles to generaliza-tion. Multipartyism, for example, takes on a different meaning and significance under proportional representation than under plurality electoral formulae. Likewise, concurrent elections are unlikely to emerge as a significant influence




on turnout outside of the framework of presidentialism. Ecological inference problems further attenuate the conclusions that may be drawn from the litera-ture. Meta-analyses of prior aggregate research, for example, suggest that turnout reflects the closeness of electoral contests (Blais, 2000, p. 59; Geys, 2006, pp. 646-648; Matsusaka & Palda, 1993, pp. 858-860), but Matsusaka and Palda (1993) present compelling evidence that aggregation bias generates a spurious relationship between closeness and electoral participation. The obvious conclusion is that some skepticism is warranted, even with respect to the most widely corroborated sets of findings.

The uncertainties are particularly marked with respect to population size, which has typically been relegated to the status of a control variable or entirely ignored. The overwhelming majority of the 83 studies covered by Geys’s (2006, p. 642) meta-analysis of turnout do not address the issue of political scale, and the same is true of the 34 studies reviewed by Blais (2000), who concludes that “the jury is still out on this question” (p. 60). But even more important, by focusing on comparisons among countries and other large units, aggregate research has failed to address the calculus governing the behavior of individual voters at the district level, calling into question the meaning and significance of the available findings regarding the impact of size. From the perspective of a “calculus-of-voting” model (Downs, 1957), the probabilities of casting a deci-sive ballot in a polity of 10 rather than 40 million inhabitants would not appear to differ enough to alter the incentives for voting. Other kinds of theoretical rationales, such as “communal activity is more prevalent in smaller settings” (Blais, 2000, p. 24), also tend to collapse as explanations for variations in turn-out among countries or other large political units.

Thus, although research focused on the individual level of analysis has typically failed to attend to the contextual conditions shaping the decision to vote, the same is arguably true of much macro-level research. As a result, the state of our knowledge with respect to size has not advanced much beyond the ambivalent conclusions reached by Dahl and Tufte (1973) some 35 years ago. Reviewing the available data on within country variations, they concluded that there is no general relationship between size and turnout: “Thus in some democratic systems, election turnouts are somewhat higher in smaller than in larger municipalities. In others, it is the reverse. In still others, there appears to be no relationship between size and turnout” (p. 61).

Theoretical PerspectivesThis article attempts to overcome the limitations of prior research by bringing both individual- and aggregate-level data to bear on the problem of explaining turnout outside of the advanced industrial democracies. The central goal is



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to analyze the impact of political scale. To this end the empirical analysis (a) explores the impact of political scale on turnout on the basis of aggregate data on voting at the subnational level, (b) assesses the influence of political scale within the framework of a theoretical model that controls for the impact of socioeconomic, attitudinal, and political process variables on individual turnout, and (c) evaluates the relative consistency of the empirical evidence with alternative theoretical accounts of the linkage between scale and elec-toral participation.

The central research hypothesis, which stipulates that electoral turnout declines as political scale increases, is consistent with three major bodies of theoretical literature. The first is the rational choice approach to turnout, which suggests that size lowers the expected benefit of voting by reducing the probability of casting a decisive vote (Downs, 1957; Levine & Palfrey, 2007; Riker & Ordeshook, 1968). A second body of literature draws on social-psychological analyses to emphasize the role of size in creating a sense of community, fostering social capital and civic engagement, enforcing norms of citizenship responsibility, and lowering the costs of political activ-ity via increased access to officials, ease of cooperation, and interaction with others (Oliver, 2000; Verba et al., 1978, pp. 273, 279; Verba & Nie, 1972). The literature on political clientelism, which may be regarded as a variant on theoretical work stressing the role of political mobilization (e.g., Rosenstone & Hansen, 1993), generates a third set of expectations about the relationship between political scale and electoral participation (Kitschelt, 2000; Kitschelt & Wilkinson, 2007; J. D. Powell, 1970; Scott, 1972). Drawing mainly on research on less industrialized nations, the novel insights of this research revolve around the role of patronage networks, face-to-face exchanges, local-level political brokers, and tangible rewards in shaping electoral participation. These issues have largely been neglected in the available research on turnout, which tends to link political mobilization to the closeness of elections (e.g., Caldeira et al., 1985; Cox & Munger, 1989). By stressing the role of political machines in mobilizing voters under conditions of limited competition or even political monopoly (e.g., Medina & Stokes, 2002), the literature on polit-ical clientelism offers a very different perspective, establishing a third basis for linking scale with electoral participation.

As the relevance of size to turnout in the rational choice and social-psychological theory has been explored at length elsewhere (e.g., Blais, 2000), I limit my theoretical discussion to the nexus between size and clien-telism. The central issue is that small communities are characterized by dense and geographically based patterns of social interaction that facilitate both (a) the construction of political networks based on personal contacts, face-to-face exchanges, and promises of tangible rewards and (b) the monitoring of




electoral turnout. Given obstacles to monitoring vote choice, the latter is key for clientelistic mobilization. As detailed in Cox and Kousser’s (1981) work on turnout in 19th-century New York, the advent of the secret ballot dealt a major blow to political machines by undermining the possibility of monitor-ing vote choice. Yet the secret ballot left standing the possibility of monitoring turnout. In Cox and Kousser’s account, politicians switched from paying voters to cast ballots to paying opponents not to cast ballots, but clearly the ability to monitor turnout also provides a way to ensure that supporters go to the polls. For the purposes of this analysis, clientelism is therefore con-ceptualized not as vote buying or corruption per se, although both may play a role in the creation of political machines; emphasis is placed instead on clientelism as a mode of electoral mobilization that entails promises of tangible benefits by political networks capable of monitoring individual participation.

If the costs and benefits of voting are both low, as assumed by most ratio-nal choice literature, then turnout is likely to be responsive to all kinds of mobilizational efforts (Aldrich, 1993; Blais, 2000, pp. 83-91). Clientelistic mobilization is unusually efficacious, however, because it lowers the costs of voting not only by providing information to voters, transportation to the polls, and so on but also by raising the benefits. In the standard rational choice model, voters’ benefits are derived from seeing their preferred candidate win. Clientelism enlarges these benefits by offering voters more personal and tan-gible rewards, ranging from the immediate, including election day festivities and T-shirts, to the prospective, including scholarships, government employ-ment, and housing, contingent on monitored electoral participation (e.g., Hilgers, 2005; Rosas & Hawkins, 2007). By altering the standard calculus of costs and benefits, clientelism thus represents a potentially powerful mecha-nism for mobilizing voters, even if the probability of casting a decisive vote is nil. It is partially for this reason that standard participation models are of restricted utility in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions of the developing world (Booth & Seligson, 2006; Bratton, 2006; Krishna, 2006).

The rational choice, social-psychological, and clientelistic literatures thus all provide reasons for linking political scale with electoral participation. But the three bodies of theory do not yield observationally equivalent predictions, creating opportunities for assessing the causal mechanisms linking scale and turnout. For rational choice theories, the expected benefits of voting depend not only on the benefits (B) gained from seeing one’s candidate win, rather than lose, but also on the probability (P) of casting the decisive ballot.P depends on two factors: the number of voters and the closeness of the election. As the number of voters declines and the closeness of the race increases, the



Remmer 281

probability of a tie vote increases. Thus, the relationship between political scale and turnout is contingent on closeness. For the literature on clientelism, the central expectation is very different: Turnout varies with size but not nec-essarily with competitiveness. Indeed, to the extent that competition matters, its impact can be conceptualized as potentially negative because the credibil-ity of promises of tangible rewards declines as the prospects of victory dim. It is precisely for this reason that clientelistic policy commitments involving jobs or local public goods work more effectively for dominant parties than challengers (Wantchekon, 2003). For social-psychological theories, the rela-tionship between size and turnout is more straightforward: Participation diminishes with community size, irrespective of competitiveness.

The three literatures also have different implications with respect to the geographical level at which the impact of size is expected to be observed. For the rational choice literature, what matters are the size and competitiveness of the electoral unit within which votes are aggregated and translated into political positions. Voters living in the same electoral district, whether resi-dents of small towns or large cities, share the same calculus regarding P. For the social-psychological and clientelism literatures, on the other hand, the key issue is the size of the community where turnout can be observed and/or monitored by others. Hence, voters are expected to cast ballots at higher rates in small communities, regardless of the odds of casting a decisive ballot.

Finally, the social-psychological and clientelist literatures generate differ-ent expectations regarding the role of socioeconomic variables. Clientelism flourishes under conditions of poverty and economic insecurity (Calvo & Murillo, 2004), suggesting that the impact of socioeconomic development (or individual socioeconomic status) on turnout is negative. The standard predictions of the social-psychological literature are precisely the opposite. Variations in participation at the individual level are assumed to correlate positively with socioeconomic status and personal resources such as income, education, and occupational status (e.g., Brady et al., 1995; Caldeira et al., 1985). Similarly, at the aggregate level, the standard expectation is that turn-out rises with per capita income, literacy rates, or other indicators of development (e.g., Blais & Dobrzynska, 1998, pp. 241-244).

To assess the impact of scale on political turnout in terms of these different theoretical perspectives, this article draws on two relatively simple models. Turnout is predicted to depend on political scale, plus a set of controls identi-fied as relevant by prior literature. At the aggregate level, these controls are designed to address the argument that turnout fluctuates with electoral com-petitiveness and the level of socioeconomic development. At the individual level of analysis, the statistical model controls for socioeconomic background,




political attitudes, level of civic engagement, and electoral competitiveness. At both levels of analysis, however, the key expectation is the same: Turnout declines with political scale.

Empirical EvidenceData for the subsequent empirical analysis are drawn from the study of turnout in the Costa Rican presidential and mayoral elections of 2002. The theoretical and methodological advantages of this focus are several. First, despite a per capita of income of only $4,059 in 2000, which closely approximates the Latin American and Caribbean average of $3,852 for that year (World Bank, 2007), Costa Rica ranks as one of the world’s oldest and most stable democra-cies. As a result, it is a case well suited to expanding our understanding of electoral turnout beyond the advanced industrial democracies. Unlike most other lower- and middle-income nations, the level and pattern of electoral participation observed in Costa Rica cannot be written off as “statistical noise” generated by recent democratization. Voters and parties have had more than five decades to adapt to the rules of the democratic game.

Second, focusing on a less industrialized nation creates opportunities for exploring the relevance of the literature on political clientelism for under-standing turnout. Although less pervasive than in nations such as India or Argentina, the available evidence suggests that clientelism plays a role in Costa Rican politics, especially in poorer communities. According to a house-hold survey of 2,929 citizens administered in seven cantons as part of a “democratic audit” of Costa Rica, 20.3% of the respondents reported offers of special inducements to vote, mainly public funds for housing, food, and education (55.9%), jobs (13.8%), and community infrastructure (3.1%). Con-sistent with the literature on clientelism, the lower the standard of living of the canton, the greater the reported incidence of electoral inducements (W. Brenes & Matorrel, 2000, pp. 12-14; Estado de la Nación en Desarrollo, 2001, Vol. 2, pp. 246-247). Allegations of clientelistic rewards being offered to voters have also surfaced in the wake of recent mayoral elections (E. Brenes, 2006; Mora, 2006; “Un Gasto Provechoso,” 2006).

Given the secret ballot, the actual impact of such practices is impossible to determine: Whatever their promises, citizens are free to vote as they wish, just as political parties are free to renege on their commitments to voters. The latter is apparently common: 90.8% of voters who reported promises of spe-cial inducements to vote in the “democratic audit” claimed that those promises remained unfulfilled (Estado de la Nación en Desarrollo, 2001, Vol. 2, p. 247). On the other hand, compared to lotteries or other potential sources of windfall



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for lower income groups, the 1 in 10 odds of delivery are high—certainly high enough to sustain a commitment to turn out. Moreover, in a country where parties establish a visible presence on election day, setting up canopies deco-rated in party colors and staffed with volunteers who guide voters to the polls, turnout is readily monitored. As argued above, it is precisely this capacity to monitor turnout that establishes the basis for clientelistic mobilization.

A third advantage of focusing on the Costa Rican case is that electoral reg-istration is automatic, making it possible to assemble reliable data on turnout rates. Elsewhere, registration may present a major hurdle for voters, leaving investigators to choose between measuring turnout on the basis of voting age population or total population, neither of which yields very precise results.

Fourth, although Costa Rican law does not mandate penalties, voting is compulsory for all elections, creating opportunities for examining differen-ces in turnout between national and local elections. As in other nations with automatic registration and compulsory voting laws, the rate of electoral turn-out in national elections has been relatively high, ranging between 60% and 83% over the 1970 to 2006 period (Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, 2007), albeit declining over time in parallel with broader international trends (see Franklin, 2004) and growing domestic disillusionment with traditional parties. Participation levels have been virtually identical for first-round presidential, national legislative, and municipal council elections, which are held on the same day every 4 years. The high rate of turnout, however, is not merely a reflection of institutional rules. National election day in Feb-ruary is celebrated in the spirit of a national holiday, with people wearing and waving party colors and bands playing Latin music. Political parties mount intense turnout campaigns, expending a significant percentage of their resources on marshalling fleets of thousands of cars, buses, and other vehicles to ferry their supporters to the polls (Feigenblatt, 2002; Solano, 2002; Villalobos, 2002). In comparison, the more recently established local elections for mayors, district representatives to the municipal council (síndicos municipales), and district councilors (concejales de distrito), which occur sep-arately in the month of December and enjoy no funding from public sources, have taken place in an atmosphere of relative indifference (Alfaro Redondo, 2002, 2006). With campaigns focused almost exclusively on local issues, such as road repair and infrastructural development (e.g., “Candidatos a Alcalde: Cantones de Alajuela,” 2006; “Candidatos a Alcalde: Cantones de Guana-caste,” 2006), the mayoral contests attracted votes from only 22.8% and 23.8% of the eligible electorate in 2002 and 2006, respectively, as compared to 68.8% and 65.2% in the first-round presidential elections of these same years.

Fifth, and of even greater importance for this study, participation rates have also varied significantly over space, ranging in the first-round 2002




presidential election from 91.7% in the district of Tapezco to 48.0% in the district of Colorado. Likewise, in the 2002 mayoral elections, turnout varied from 76.2% to 8.8% (Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, 2007). Given the difficulties in generalizing about turnout on the basis of comparisons across nations with widely varying institutional systems, this pattern of intrana-tional variation establishes a useful basis for developing new insights into the undertheorized relationship of political scale to electoral participation.

Finally, sophisticated survey research and detailed aggregate data are available for the study of participation in both local and national Costa Rican elections in 2002. Given the problems of ecological inference associated with reliance on aggregate data, the availability of survey data offers major advan-tages. Yet as Katz and King (1999) have observed, “As analyses of random selections of isolated individuals from unknown geographical locations, they [surveys] necessarily miss much of electoral politics. As such, they are often best complemented with studies of aggregate electoral returns” (p. 15). In this respect, the advantages of the Costa Rican data are twofold. First, official electoral results are widely regarded as unbiased and accurate. Elections are supervised by an independent government agency, the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, which possesses extensive supervisory powers over the counting and reporting of votes as well as investigating complaints regarding viola-tions of the electoral laws.

The other major advantage of Costa Rican electoral data is that they are reported down to the level of the district, for which detailed and temporally proximate census data are also available. The country is divided into seven provinces, 81 cantons, and 465 districts. In 2002, districts averaged 8,301 inhabitants and 5,014 voters—a number that closely approximates that identi-fied by Plato as the ideal number of citizens for a republic. Districts, however, are not of uniform size but range from a low of 295 inhabitants to 76,177, open-ing avenues for exploring the relationship between district size and turnout. Also helpful for analytical purposes, the votes for neither national offices nor local mayors and municipal councilors are translated into political positions at the district level, making it possible to determine whether or not the behavior of voters is consistent with rational choice rather than social-psychological or clientelistic accounts of electoral turnout. To the extent that turnout revolves around the probability of casting a decisive ballot, size should factor into the equation only at the level at which votes are aggregated into outcomes. For the election of the president, the relevant electoral district is the nation as a whole. For mayors, what matters is the vote at the canton rather than the district level.



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Aggregate-Level Data and Evidence

To explore the impact of scale on turnout, I begin by focusing on aggregate data. Because all eligible voters are automatically registered in Costa Rica, the dependent variables for the purposes of this analysis are the ratio of total votes to registered voters for the February 2002 first-round presidential elec-tions, the second-round elections of April 2002, and the December 2002 mayoral elections as reported by official sources (Tribunal Supremo de Elec-ciones, 2007). Presidential elections have traditionally been resolved in the first round, but a second-round election was held in 2002, providing an addi-tional set of observations with which to assess the impact of political scale.1

The key independent variables are district size, measured on the basis of total population (logged to achieve distributional normality) in 2000, and elec-toral competitiveness, which is measured in terms of the percentage difference between the vote of the two strongest parties at the district level (labeled “margin”). On the assumption that the consequences of size may depend on competitiveness in accordance with the logic of rational choice models, the analysis also includes an interaction term.

Data on the socioeconomic characteristics of districts, which are utilized as control variables, are drawn from census reports (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, 2000a, 2000b). Given the established relevance of age, education, and wealth for understanding turnout, the analysis controls for the percentage of the district’s population that is illiterate, the logged percentage of the population that is older than 65 years of age, the percentage of houses with indoor sanitation, and the rate of unemployment. Finally, for the first-round presidential and local elections, the analysis also controls for the effective number of political parties based on voting shares (ENPV). For the two-party presidential runoff contest, ENPV is essentially equivalent to the margin of victory (r = .956) and is therefore excluded from the estimations.

Ordinary least squares estimations of turnout at the district level in the two rounds of the presidential elections are presented in Table 1. The key finding is that after controlling for both competitiveness and socioeconomic develop-ment, district size has a negative and statistically significant impact on turnout. Translating the coefficients from the first column of the table into marginal effects, it can be estimated that as the population of a community increases from 1,000 to 5,000, with all other variables set at their mean, elec-toral participation in the first-round elections drops from 72.6% to 69.6%. With an additional increase in district population to 10,000, turnout declines another 1.2%. The effects of size are even stronger for the first model esti-mating participation in the second-round election: As population increases




from 1,000 to 5,000, estimated turnout declines from 67.1% to 62.0%, with additional population increments yielding a diminishing effect on voting. It may be noted that adding population density to these models leaves these results fundamentally unchanged.

These findings regarding the impact of community size are clearly more consistent with social-psychological or mobilizational accounts of political participation than with simple rational choice models. Given a single national district for the election of president, voters in large Costa Rican communities have precisely the same odds of influencing the election outcome as voters in small ones; that is, the probability of casting a decisive ballot (P) is a constant and thus cannot explain variations across communities of different size. More-over, although competitiveness matters to participation, the findings with

Table 1. Determinants of Electoral Turnout at the District Level: Costa Rican Presidential Elections, February and April 2002

First-Round Election Second-Round Election

Population (log) -0.029 -0.018 -0.014 -0.032 -0.021 (0.003)*** (0.004)*** (0.004)*** (0.003)*** (0.005)***% older than 65 0.051 0.048 0.031 0.042 0.040 (0.009)*** (0.008)*** (0.009)*** (0.009)*** (0.009)***% illiterate -0.005 -0.005 -0.005 -0.003 -0.003 (0.001)*** (0.001)*** (0.001)*** (0.001)* (0.001)*Sanitation 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 0.001 (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)*** (0.000)***% unemployed -0.003 -0.003 -0.003 -0.001 -0.001 (0.001)*** (0.001)** (0.001)*** (0.001) (0.001)Margin -0.088 0.641 0.507 -0.082 0.358 (0.030)** (0.189)*** (0.182)** (0.025)*** (0.182)*Margin × -0.093 -0.091 -0.054 population (0.024)*** (0.023)*** (0.022)* (log)ENPV -0.067 (0.010)*** Constant 0.844 0.753 0.916 0.781 0.693 (0.045)** (0.050)*** (0.054)*** (0.044)*** (0.057)***Observations 451 451 451 453 453R2 .42 .44 .49 .36 .37

Note: ENPV = effective number of political parties based on voting shares. Standard errors are in parentheses.*Significant at .05. **Significant at .01. ***Significant at .001.



Remmer 287

respect to the negative and statistically significant interaction terms presented in the second, third, and fifth columns of the table are not fully consistent with rational choice understandings. As indicated by Figure 1, which plots the mar-ginal effect of competitiveness on turnout across the observed range of community size for the first-round presidential election, a lack of competition raises, rather than lowers, turnout in communities with fewer than 1,945 inhabitants in accordance with the logic of the literature on clientelism. The results are similar for the second round of presidential elections.

The impact of the other variables included in the estimates accord with social-psychological accounts of voting. Consistent with that literature, illiter-acy, unemployment, and the percentage of households lacking indoor sanitation tend to reduce turnout, whereas the percentage of the population older than 65 has a positive effect. These effects are reasonably consistent across the two types of presidential election but are weaker for the second-round election of April. Finally, for the first-round presidential elections, we also see that turnout declines as the number of parties competing for power increases.

The results for local elections presented in Table 2 provide even stronger evidence of the negative impact of community size, suggesting that as the mobilizational activities of national parties and citizen interest in elections decline, the importance of psychosocial or clientelistic incentives for voting

–.6

–.4

–.2

0.2

6 7 8 9 10 11

Log of Population

Marginal Effect of Electoral Margin 95 % Confidence Interval

Dependent Variable : Electoral Turnout

Figure 1. Marginal effect of electoral margin as population changes




increases. In these elections, voters in districts with fewer than 2,000 inhabit-ants were more than twice as likely to vote as citizens living in districts of 20,000 or more. The other variables included in the regression are far less important and, with the exception of the log of the population older than 65, have a weaker impact than in presidential elections. The most striking differ-ences between the local and presidential results, however, are those relating to the socioeconomic variables and competitiveness. The directions of the impacts of illiteracy, indoor sanitary facilities, and unemployment all run dia-metrically counter to standard accounts of turnout as well as the evidence presented for presidential elections. Drawing on the first model in the table, for example, it may be estimated that as illiteracy doubles from a mean value of 6.41% to 12.82%, the rate of turnout increases from 30.5% to 33.8%. Con-versely, as illiteracy drops from the mean level to 3.0%, turnout declines 1.8%. The results for sanitation are similar.

Table 2. Determinants of Turnout at the District Level: Costa Rican Mayoral Elections, December 2002

Population (log) -6.444 -6.929 -6.452 -6.277 (0.475)*** (0.727)*** (0.492)*** (0.492)***% older than 65 5.222 5.291 5.211 5.484 (1.445)*** (1.448)*** (1.457)*** (1.450)***% illiterate 0.516 0.512 0.517 0.495 (0.195)** (0.195)** (0.196)** (0.195)**Sanitation -0.123 -0.119 -0.123 -0.122 (0.044)** (0.044)** (0.044)** (0.044)**% unemployment 0.312 0.307 0.312 0.271 (0.153)* (0.153)* (0.153)* (0.153)†

Margin 2.879 -18.746 2.985 0.217 (2.706) (24.680) (3.196) (3.328)Margin × population (log) 2.602 (2.952) ENPV 0.044 -1.735 (0.696) (0.945)†

National party share -9.754 (3.542)**Constant 81.646 85.231 81.582 93.737 (7.333)*** (8.386)*** (7.412)*** (8.580)***Observations 450 450 450 450Adj. R2 .50 .50 .50 .51

Note: ENPV = effective number of political parties based on voting shares. Standard errors are in parentheses.†Significant at .10. *Significant at .05. **Significant at .01. ***Significant at .001.



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The findings with respect to competitiveness are equally inconsistent with the conventional wisdom and the results for presidential elections. Although the coefficient is not statistically significant, the bigger the percentage differ-ence in the vote received by the two strongest parties at the district level, the higher the rate of participation. Also insignificant is the interaction between the indicator of competitiveness and community size. Predicting turnout on the basis of the size of the electorate and margin of victory at the canton level, where votes in local elections are actually translated into political positions, yields virtually identical results. Contrary to the Downsian model, in local elections size matters but closeness does not, nor is the interaction between size and closeness at the canton level remotely significant. In short, turnout in local elections is not sensitive to the probability of casting the decisive ballot.

Column 3 introduces a control for the effective number of parties, which is also insignificant. More revealing with respect to the incentives for partici-pation is the variable measuring the percentage vote received by the three major national parties in each district, which is included in the fourth set of estimates. The smaller that percentage, the higher the turnout, pointing to the importance of local networks in mobilizing voters in local elections. For the presidential elections, the impact of the major national party share of the vote on district level turnout is precisely the opposite: the coefficient is posi-tive and statistically significant at the .000 level.

These findings speak to differences in the mobilizational activity shaping turnout in local and national elections. Although turnout in the latter revolves around the campaigns of national parties, the former is dependent on mobili-zation by local parties and political networks operating within poorer and more economically insecure districts. In the Province of Guanacaste, for example, average district turnout in local elections was 30.5%, but in districts where the small Guanacaste Independiente (GI) party ran candidates for mayor, the turnout rate averaged 55.1%. Many of these same districts consti-tute bastions of national party strength in presidential elections, suggesting the dependence of national parties on the mobilizational effort of local networks. A case in point is the district of Porvenir, where the GI won 72.6% of the vote in the mayoral elections with a turnout rate of 66.9%—nearly 3 times the national average. In the presidential elections, the same district voted 58.8% in favor of the nationally organized Liberación Nacional, far outstripping that party’s national vote total of 40.9%.

Individual-Level Data and EvidenceTo shed additional light on the effects of scale, I analyze individual-level data on turnout in the 2002 first-round presidential and mayoral elections. The




data are drawn from a national survey of 1,656 Costa Ricans in 2004 made available by the Latin American Public Opinion Project. They are comple-mented with information on population and the closeness of elections at the district level based on official sources, including the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (2007) and the census office (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, 2000a, 2000b).

For the individual-level models, the dependent variables are turnout in the first-round presidential election of February 2002 and the mayoral elections of December 2002 as measured by self-reported participation. As in other studies utilizing self-reported turnout, the data appear to be upwardly biased; but compared with estimates of overreporting in other research (e.g., Bratton, 1999; Silver, Anderson, & Abramson, 1986), the bias is not particularly large, especially for the presidential contest, and, if anything, it skews the analysis in favor of the null hypothesis by exaggerating the participation of voters in larger communities. Although survey respondents from urban and rural areas, respectively, reported participation rates of 78.5% and 71.4% in the presiden-tial elections, official data show urban and rural turnout rates equal to 70.0% and 67.9% (Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, 2007). The same trend holds for the mayoral elections: the self-reported participation rates of urban and rural voters are 34.3% and 40.4%, respectively, as compared to official results of 16.4% and 31.6%.

Following relatively standard models of political participation, the control variables fall into three major categories: socioeconomic background, politi-cal values and attitudes, and civic engagement. The first category draws from a battery of survey questions about gender, age, education, income, religion, and living standard. The latter is a composite indicator of household posses-sions, as detailed in the description of variables contained in the appendix. The second category of control variables includes measures of system sup-port, support for political institutions, support for local government, political efficacy, and prodemocratic values. The third category assesses civic engage-ment on the basis of reported political activity, associational activity, and clientelistic political contacting. Also considered is individual participation in elections at another tier on the assumption that individuals who participate in the election of local authorities are more likely to turn out for national elec-tions, and vice versa. Finally, two contextual variables are added to the survey data: the population (logged) and competitiveness of the district in which the respondent was living. Again, competitiveness is assessed on the basis of the difference in the vote received by the two strongest parties at the district level.

The results of the statistical analysis, which draw on logistic estimations with clustered standard errors, are presented in Table 3. Looking first at the



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Table 3. Determinants of Turnout at the Individual Level: Costa Rican Elections, 2002

Presidential Mayoral

Female 0.358 0.378 -0.027 -0.072 (0.227) (0.244) (0.162) (0.180)Age (log) 0.681 0.388 1.210 1.154 (0.236)** (0.265) (0.334)*** (0.373)**University 0.626 0.722 0.351 0.253 (0.298)* (0.319)* (0.208) (0.207)Income 0.074 0.111 -0.095† -0.106 (0.045)* (0.050)* (0.034)** (0.035)**Living standard 0.030 -0.018 0.180 0.184 (0.064) (0.068) (0.060)** (0.066)**Catholic 0.671 0.599 0.365 0.254 (0.305)* (0.337)† (0.173)* (0.183)System support 0.040 0.044 0.013 -0.002 (0.036) (0.037) (0.033) (0.033)Local govt. support 0.058 0.015 0.219 0.223 (0.104) (0.115) (0.099)* (0.108)*Efficacy 0.269 0.237 0.376 0.316 (0.224) (0.239) (0.186)* (0.184)Prodemocratic 0.206 0.211 -0.009 -0.058 (0.095)* (0.101)* (0.054) (0.065)Support for political institutions 0.045 0.037 0.044 0.040 (0.018)** (0.018)* (0.021)* (0.023)*Associational activity 0.046 -0.012 0.118 0.110 (0.090) (0.096) (0.093) (0.097)Political activity 0.088 -0.013 0.368 0.378 (0.112) (0.109) (0.071)*** (0.067)***Clientelism -0.445 -0.697 0.697 0.901 (0.601) (0.594) (0.583) (0.529)†

Population (log) 0.118 0.279 -0.337 -0.367 (0.184) (0.217) (0.128)** (0.142)**Electoral margin -1.220 -2.064 0.289 0.529 (2.092) (2.214) (0.789) (0.843)Other electoral participation 1.897 1.852 (0.285)*** (0.282)***Constant -5.791 -6.200 -4.639 -5.127 (2.210)** (2.333)** (1.762)** (1.855)**Observations 1,060 1,048 1,048 1,048Pseudo-R2 13.7 20.9 14.9 19.4% correctly classified 83.9 85.2 71.4 71.3Pearson c2 79.9 123.35 78.04 115.9

Note: Robust standard errors are in parentheses.†Significant at .10. *Significant at .05. **Significant at .01. ***Significant at .001.




estimates for the presidential election, the findings mainly underline the importance of socioeconomic variables and political attitudes, with higher education, income, age, religious affiliation, and prodemocratic attitudes all having their predicted effects. On the other hand, given the results of prior research, associational and political activity are both surprisingly weak pre-dictors of electoral turnout. The main exception is participation in elections at another tier, which is assessed in the second column of the table. The pre-dicted probability of voting in the presidential elections is 96.0 for respondents who participated in the mayoral elections, as compared to 78.3 for those who did not. Finally, in contrast to the aggregate analysis, turnout in the presiden-tial election was not significantly influenced by political scale, the effective number of parties, or relative closeness of the contest, whether assessed on the basis of the simple models shown in Table 3 or interaction models. Although not included in the table because of limitations of space, also insignificant are potential curvilinear effects involving income or living standard.

The results for mayoral elections are again rather different. The attitudinal variables measuring support for democracy and national institutions exert less influence on turnout, whereas support for local government becomes statistically significant. Socioeconomic variables also gain in importance, but in directions that run contrary to prior research on turnout. Particularly interesting is the negative and statistically significant coefficient for income, which is consistent with the literature on clientelism. As detailed in Table 4, as income increases from the lowest to the highest level with all other vari-ables set at their means, the predicted probability of voting declines from 48.4% to 26.7%. Also of greater significance relative to presidential elections are political efficacy, political engagement, and clientelistic contacting, sug-gesting that involvement in political networks and promises of material rewards matter more for participation in low-profile elections than for those involving high levels of partisan mobilization. As political activity increases from 0 to 4 on a scale ranging from 0 to 7, the probability of voting in local elections more than doubles. Similarly, individuals who report being pres-sured or rewarded by others are 17.2% more likely to report voting in the mayoral elections than those who do not.

The results for local elections also differ in terms of the impact of political scale. As reflected in Table 4, participation in local elections declines signifi-cantly with district population. Small community size therefore compensates for limited individual political resources. For example, drawing on the third model presented in Table 3, the predicted probability of an individual living in a district of 5,000 with no university education casting a ballot in local elec-tions is 10.2% higher than that for an individual with a university education



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living in a district with more than 50,000 residents. As in the aggregate analy-sis, these findings cannot be explained in terms of the probability of casting a decisive ballot. Individual turnout is not influenced by the closeness of the race at the district level. The same is true if closeness is measured at the com-munal level where local elections are decided. Controlling for the effective number of parties competing at the district level does not alter these results, nor does a specification involving the interaction between closeness and voting. Estimating the same models utilizing a two-level hierarchical regres-sion also yields very similar results. The impact of population is reduced but nevertheless remains statistically significant.

ConclusionGuided mainly by rational choice and social-psychological models, prior research on electoral turnout has emphasized the importance of electoral laws, electoral competitiveness, and individual sociodemographic, attitudinal, and behavioral characteristics. The main assumption is that turnout depends on individual resources and/or individual calculations regarding the costs and benefits of voting. Although relevant within both the rational choice and social-psychological frameworks, less fully explored are the consequences of political context. The available research results are exiguous, mixed, and largely limited to the advanced democracies, in which electoral mobiliza-tion pivots around programmatically oriented parties. Broadening the focus

Table 4. Predicted Probability of Turnout in the First-Round Presidential and Mayoral Elections of 2002

Presidential Election Mayoral Election

District population 5,000 83.5 46.310,000 84.6 40.615,000 85.2 37.325,000 85.9 33.450,000 86.9 28.4

Income levelLowest 80.1 48.4Mean 85.2 37.3Highest 89.4 26.7

Note: Entries are the predicted probability of voting in the presidential and mayoral elections with all other variables included in Columns 1 and 3 of Table 3 set at their means.




of inquiry both theoretically and empirically, this study brings insights from the literature on clientelism to bear on the study of turnout and explores their relevance on the basis of both aggregate and individual-level data in a less industrialized setting.

With the focus on national contests, the findings suggest that standard models offer considerable traction for understanding turnout outside of the advanced industrial world. At the aggregate level, the more mature, educated, prosperous, and competitive the local district, the higher the level of turnout. Similarly, at the individual level, the findings underline the importance of indi-vidual resources, with age, education, income, and religion playing a role, along with attitudes supportive of democracy and national political institutions. The story is a familiar one based on prior research on electoral participation in many contexts, including Costa Rica; nevertheless, it is also theoretically incomplete and largely inapplicable to local elections.

The key theoretical limitation relates to the importance of political scale. At the aggregate level of analysis, the most powerful predictor of turnout is not the socioeconomic profile or competitiveness of a district but community size. These effects are attenuated in the individual-level analysis of national elections, presumably because the mobilizational efforts of national parties offset the importance of activation via local social networks; nevertheless, size emerges as a significant factor in both the aggregate and the individual-level analyses of turnout in local elections.

The findings of this study also depart from standard accounts of turnout in several other key respects. First, contrary to rational choice models, the impact of size on turnout in Costa Rica has not pivoted around the probability of cast-ing a decisive ballot. Even when those probabilities are identical in all districts, as in the presidential elections, voters in small communities still turn out at higher rates than other citizens. Likewise, in local elections in which the chances of casting a decisive vote are constant within communes, community size rem-ains a major determinant of voting. Second, although competition has fuelled participation in national elections, its marginal impact has been negative in small districts as well as insignificant in local elections, again underlining the limitations of attempting to explain turnout in terms of the rational choice model. Third, contrary to standard social-psychological perspectives stressing the positive impact of individual resources on turnout, the statistical analysis provides evidence of precisely the opposite effect, with participation in local elections declining with the level of community development and individual income.

The research on clientelism addresses all of these theoretical anomalies. First, with respect to the relevance of community as distinct from electoral



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district size, the dense and geographically based patterns of social interac-tion characteristic of small communities facilitate political mobilization on the basis of face-to-face contacts and exchanges. Second, by offering voters tangible benefits, clientelism creates incentives for voting that fall outside of the standard sociopsychological or rational choice models. Hence, turnout may be shaped less by personal resources, competitiveness, or the probability of casting a decisive vote than by the probability of reap-ing other kinds of rewards—rewards whose importance rises with poverty and economic insecurity. The theoretical implications are threefold: (a) the smaller the size of the political unit, the greater the possibility for clien-telistic political mobilization, (b) the benefits of voting are conditioned by the probability of gaining a clientelistic reward, and (c) the lower the level of individual resources, the greater the incentives for voting in response to clientelistic inducements. Evidence of all three tendencies emerges from the study of Costa Rican turnout; however, the findings are consistent only for local elections.

The logical conclusion is that turnout in Costa Rica is conditioned by two distinct, but complementary, forms of electoral mobilization, with per-sonal networks predominating in local elections and political parties in national contests. Consistent with this interpretation are the contrasting effects of socio economic variables on aggregate turnout at the national and local levels; the heavy dependence of local, but not national, turnout on individual political involvement; the significance of interpersonal pressures for voting in local but not national elections; the contrasting impact of national party vote share on turnout in local and national elections; and the differing impact of community size on turnout in national and local elections in the analysis of individual data.

Local political networks and national political parties, however, are obvi-ously interdependent. The former rely on linkages with national representatives for funds to mobilize voters as well as legislative allocations to finance the delivery of goods and services at the municipal level (Hall, Arce, & Monge, 2002). National parties, in turn, rely on local networks to mobilize voters. Hence, in the aggregate data, we see high turnout in presidential elections in districts where a single party comes close to holding a political monopoly as well as evidence of districts swinging to local parties in the mayoral elections but delivering strong support for a national party in the presidential elections. The foundations of the national party system are constructed on local networks, which is presumably why community size emerges as such an important det-erminant of turnout in the aggregate analysis of both presidential and local elections.




The main implications of these findings for the study of electoral turnout are twofold. First, existing accounts of turnout need to be expanded to incor-porate insights derived from the study of political clientelism. The majority of the world’s democratic citizens live under conditions of economic scarcity that create incentives for politicians to lower the costs and increase the bene-fits of voting. If clientelism can flourish in Costa Rica, a nation widely admired for the stability and quality of its democracy, the obvious implication is that it needs to be taken seriously as an inducement to vote elsewhere—an indu-cement likely to operate in conjunction with other influences on turnout, potentially generating hybrid patterns of electoral mobilization that are inad-equately captured by any single theoretical model. From this perspective, the “paradox of voting” is considerably attenuated and/or limited to a relatively narrow geographical domain. To the extent that promises of tangible benefits figure into the calculus of voting and offset the well-documented impact of individual resources, the contribution of rational choice to the study of turnout is significantly enlarged, albeit in ways largely unanticipated by that body of literature.

Second, by failing to incorporate political scale more systematically and meaningfully into the analysis of turnout, prior comparative research has overlooked an important influence on citizen behavior. The pertinent variable is not the size of the electoral district within which votes are aggregated and translated into political positions, much less the population of an entire coun-try; what matters is the size of the political unit within which turnout can be observed and monitored by others. The challenge for future research, whether at the individual or the aggregate level, is to marshal evidence capable of addressing this neglected dimension of political life.

Finally, the findings of this study have important general implications for comparative research in political science. Apart from electoral districts, whose size may be legally standardized within nations, political units, whether geographical (e.g., countries or states), institutional (e.g., legislatures or bur-eaucracies), or associational (e.g., interest groups or social movements), often differ dramatically in size. If a shift in community size from 2,500 to 5,000 has a significant impact on electoral participation, how valid is the assump-tion of causal homogeneity as applied to the comparison of turnout across countries with the population per electoral district ranging from 4,026 to 1,870,945? Because the same question could be asked about research across a wide range of theoretical domains, the central conclusion is that future comparative research needs to address the role of political scale more directly and systematically.



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Appendix

Description of Survey Questions Used in the Individual Level Analysis

Dependent Variables

1. Participation in first-round presidential election: dummy variable based on answer to the following question: “¿Votó en la primera vuelta de las pasadas elecciones presidenciales, en febrero de 2002?” (Did you vote in the first round of the last presidential elec-tion in February 2002?)

2. Participation in mayoral election: dummy variables based on response to the following question: “¿Votó usted en la elecciones para elegir alcaldes en diciembre del 2002?” (Did you vote in the elections to elect mayors in December of 2002?)

Independent Variables

A. Socioeconomic background variables1. Gender (1 = female, 0 = male)2. Age (log)3. University education (0 = no university education, 1 = one or more

years at university)4. Household income (ordinal variable ranging from 0 to 10)5. Living standard (index ranging from 0 to 10 based on sum of yes–

no answers to questions about ownership of telephones, household appliances, vehicles, and computers; access to potable water; and indoor sanitary facilities)

6. Religion (1 = Catholic, 0 = other)B. Attitudinal variables1. Political efficacy: dummy variable based on agreement that voting

can change things in the future (= 1)2. System support: ordinal variable ranging from 0 to 12 based on

level of pride in living in Costa Rica and belief that one should support the Costa Rican political system

3. Local government support: level of support for municipal govern-ment ranging from 0 to 3 based on positive or negative assessment

(continued)




Appendix (continued)

of municipal services, municipal management, and support for increased municipal funding

4. Support for political institutions: level of confidence in justice system, Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, national legislature, and national government and respect for Costa Rican political institu-tions scaled from 0 to 30

5. Prodemocratic: support for democracy ranging from 1 to 7 based on level of agreement with the statement, “Puede que la democracia tenga problemas pero es major que cualquier forma de Gobierno” (democracy may have problems but it is better than any other form of government)

C. Civic engagement1. Associational activity: attendance of meetings of community imp-

rovement, professional, commercial, or producer organizations (range = 0–6)

2. Political activity: attendance of political party or municipal govern-ment meetings; political contacting of national legislator, national bureaucracy, or local authorities; or participation in electoral cam-paigns (range = 0–7)

3. Clientelistic contacting: dummy variable for response to question regarding pressures or rewards for voting (or not voting)

D. Contextual variables1. Population of district of residence (logged)2. Margin: difference between the vote received by two strongest

parties at the district level in the pertinent election

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Mitchell Seligson of Vanderbilt University for making available the survey data utilized in this study.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Financial Disclosure/Funding

The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.



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Bio

Karen L. Remmer is a professor of political science at Duke University in Durham, NC.



political scale and electoral turnout: evidence from the less industrialized world

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