Understanding Voter Fatigue: Election Frequency and Electoral Abstention Approval
Understanding Voter Fatigue: Election Frequency and Electoral Abstention Approval (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123425000171) was written by Filip Kostelka in 2025. It was published in the British Journal of Political Science (vol. 55).
The author designed a survey experiment to gauge social acceptability of abstaining from elections. This survey was fielded in Czechia, France, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia in November and December 2023. For each country, a balanced sample was achieved by quotas on sex, age, region, municipality size, and education.
The experimental design involves random assignment of a vignette (1 of 5) which have important qualitative differences:
- 2-4 indicate that there are two elections this year, while 5 indicates that there are four elections this year.
2 indicates that the previous election was presidential, 3 indicates it was MEP, and 4 indicates it was municipal.
Respondents are then asked about the acceptability, on an 11-point scale, of abstaining from the coming election.
There are 12,221 respondents across all countries, approximately 2,450 per country.
The author finds that frequent elections cause acceptability in abstention. There appears to be a cumulative effect, in that the effect is greater given 4 elections vs 2 elections. They also find no statistically significant difference between the types of prior elections.