Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in
Established Democracies Since 1945. By Mark N. Franklin. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.
According to Mark Franklin, “As the vexing questions of
political science can be regarded as puzzles, the particular topic of
voter turnout could be called the ‘grand enchilada’ of puzzles
of political science…. [A]lmost everything about voter
turnout is puzzling, from the question of why anyone bothers to vote at
all to the question of why certain variables appear to explain voter
turnout in some circumstances but not in others.” He makes this bold
but true statement in the preface (p. xi) of his comparative study of
turnout in more than 20 established democracies since World War II. Voter
turnout is one of the more frequently studied topics in political science,
but the results of all these scholarly efforts remain rather poor and
unsatisfactory. We still know distressingly little about why some people
vote and others do not, why turnout is much higher in some countries than
in others, and why in so many countries there seems to be a steady and
irrevocable decline in turnout in national elections.