Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
November 1, 2023
Summary:
Habit is among the most influential explanations for why people vote. Scholars have addressed the impact of individual disruptions to habitual voting, but analyses including several life events are rare. We combine two panel surveys, conducted in the UK during 1991-2017, to examine the impact of unemployment, retirement, changes in partnership status, moving and disability on voting. We distinguish between habitual voters, occasional voters and habitual non-voters. For all voter groups, turnout declines with divorce. For other life events, the impacts diverge across the voter groups. Overall, the findings suggest that social connections are the strongest underlying mechanisms explaining the changes. Although the results support the voting habit thesis, they also suggest that previous research has overstated the persistence of voting habits. The results revise some of the canonical findings by demonstrating that the impact of life events differs across people with different voting habits and across different life events.
Published in
Political Studies
Volume and page numbers
Volume: 71 , p.1243 -1260
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211064579
ISSN
00323217
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Related Publications
-
The impact of life events on turnout: habitual voting does not seem to be as resistant to change as often assumed
Lauri Rapeli, Achillefs Papageorgiou, Mikko Mattila,Media - 20220207
#547150