Local Electoral Participation in Europe: The Roots of Municipal Politics

While electoral participation is a traditional topic in political science, voter turnout at the local level is still highly uncharted. Large-N comparative works on municipal turnout are very few, and thus a comprehensive comparative picture of local electoral participation is still lacking. This book aims to fill exactly this gap, and approaches the topic in an innovative way. The volume offers three major advances at an empirical, methodological and theoretical level. Empirically, it provides a large-N comparison by covering 18 European countries and over 70.000 municipalities. Methodologically, based on the multi-level congruence (MLC) theory (i.e. the degree of congruence in electoral results among different levels), the book studies municipal turnout in relation to national turnout, and it employs the turnout variation between those levels. Theoretically, it bridges the two main and usually mutually exclusive theoretical strands on local elections - the lower-rank and the different-kind approaches. This book thus adds to the academic knowledge on the features and mechanisms of local voting, and offers a broad comparative research in electoral studies and local government.