No Political Equality Without Social Equality – Social Imbalance in Voter Turnout in European Capitals

For years, voter turnout is shrinking at all political levels. The numbers world-wide and for various pan-European decision-making levels in particular are alarming. Although we know much about why citizens cast their vote or do not participate in elections, it is the social imbalance of low voter turnout across the European Union for national and European elections which has attracted only scarce scholarly attention so far. This paper offers a first pan-European research design analyzing the turnout of national and European elections of various European Member States and presents a completely new dataset. Following the findings by Hajnal und Trounstine (2005) that social imbalances of low voter turnout can be best measured at the city neighbourhood-level, we conduct a small-scale analysis of voter turnout in several capital cities of the European Union. The quantitative analysis is based on administrative data of turnout and various socioeconomic indicators that influence turnout in European capital cities. Through the use on administrative data the analysis is less vulnerable to measurement errors. By focusing on voters at city-district-level we find that lower turnout in national and European parliamentary elections leads to substantial reductions in the representation of certain social groups. Across the European Union voting is much more unlikely for unemployed, less educated and young European citizens. This social imbalance in voter turnout threatens also the ideal of political equality and is thus directly linked to the democratic deficit of the European Union.