Fostering turnout?: Assessing party leaders' capacity to mobilize voters.

Abstract Although recent research on the personalization of politics has provided empirical evidence of leadership effects on voting behaviour, previous studies have dealt primarily with an impact on vote choice, neglecting the primary step of the voting decision process: turnout. Exploring the relationship between leader effects and turnout gains relevance considering the generalized decline in voter turnout rates across Western democracies as a symptom of the dealignment process, pointed as a key cause of the personalization of politics. Despite this theoretical linkage, it is yet unstudied whether voters' evaluations of leaders have an effect on turnout. This study attempts at assessing the impact of voters' evaluations of political leaders on turnout decisions using data from 25 countries, derived from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. Results show a positive significant effect of voters' evaluations of candidates on turnout. Moreover, this effect was especially strong amongst dealigned voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]