Predictions of Voter Turnout in Transitional and Marginal Democracies.

Comparative analyses of voter turnout, with few exceptions, focus almost exclusively on industrialized democracies. This paper seeks to determine whether the institutions and individual factors that have been empirically linked to turnout in consolidated democracies can be applied to developing democracies. To answer this question, election results and electoral statistics for developing democracies for all elections meeting minimal characteristics of legitimacy over the years 1974–2002 are used to estimate a cross-sectional time series model predicting turnout. Preliminary results indicate that, while institutions that affect the ease of the translation of a citizen's vote to representation matter in determining variation in voter turnout, those effects are conditioned on how far along the state is to consolidating its democracy. From these results, this paper concludes that there are additional unique factors that predict turnout in developing democracies, leaving the door open for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]