Peer reviewed articles

Public Opinion, Turnout and Social Policy

2018 Ruth Dassonneville Elections / Public opinion / Turnout

Abstract According to democratic theory, policy responsiveness is a key characteristic of democratic government: citizens’ preferences should affect policy outcomes. Empirically, however, the connection between public opinion and policy is not self-evident and is increasingly challenged. Using an originally constructed dataset with information from 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2014, our research design allows […] Read more

Peer reviewed articles

Voter Turnout Decline and Stratification

2016 Ruth Dassonneville Turnout

Abstract Turnout rates are in decline in advanced democracies, but the consequences of this trend for inequalities in participation have not yet been investigated in a large, comparative study. In this article, we investigate educational inequalities in six countries. First, we examine whether Tingsten’s law of dispersion holds and whether decreasing turnout rates imply more […] Read more

Peer reviewed articles

High Turnout in the Low Countries

2016 Ruth Dassonneville Compulsory voting / Turnout

Abstract We use a quasi-experimental framework to test the conventional wisdom that left-of-center parties benefit from higher turnout by analyzing the partisan effects of the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands. Fixed effects, multilevel, and matching models of party family vote shares in the Netherlands before and after the reform–and in reference to a […] Read more

Peer reviewed articles

Staying with the Party, Switching or Exiting?

2016 Ruth Dassonneville Electoral volatility / Turnout

Abstract A large body of literature has investigated the factors that lead to abstention on the one hand or vote volatility on the other hand. We argue in this paper that the most fruitful approach is to simultaneously consider the exit, voice, and loyalty options. The analyses are based on data from the Comparative Study […] Read more