Elections are at the heart of our democracy. Understanding citizens’ decisions to vote or to abstain in elections is crucial, especially when turnout in so many established democracies is declining.
In The Motivation to Vote, André Blais and Jean-François Daoust provide an original and elegant model for why people vote. They argue that the decision to vote or abstain hinges on answers to four key questions: Do I like politics? Do I have a duty to vote? Do I care about the outcome? Is it easy to vote? These considerations make sense of people’s turnout decision most of the time, in a wide variety of contexts, and are strongly supported by empirical evidence from elections in five countries (Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and France).
The authors also test alternative explanations of voter turnout by looking at contextual factors and the role of habit, but find little evidence to support these hypotheses. This analysis is compelling and further demonstrates the power of their model to provide a provocative and parsimonious explanation of voter turnout in elections.
André Blais is one of the world’s leading experts on voting behaviour and electoral systems. He is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal where he holds the Research Chair in Electoral Studies. He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a research fellow with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC), former president of the Canadian Political Science Association, and past chair of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
Professor Blais was the principal co-investigator of a Collaborative Research Initiative project (Making Electoral Democracy Work) with economists, political scientists, and psychologists from Canada, Europe, and the United States on the impact of electoral systems on the behaviour of voters and political parties. He was also a co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study from 1988 to 1993 and the principal investigator from 1997 to 2006. He has published twenty-two books, eight edited volumes, more than two hundred journal articles, and more than one hundred chapters in edited volumes.
Jean-François Daoust studies political behaviour and public opinion. He is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship at McGill University (2018-20) and a visiting scholar at Harvard University (Winter 2018).
Professor Daoust combines a comparative approach with a specialization in Canadian politics. He has published many articles, appearing in journals such as the
Journal of Politics, Party Politics, West European Politics, Electoral Studies, Representation, Government and Opposition, the
Canadian Journal of Political Science, and
Perspectives on Politics.
