Interest in Elections and Electoral Participation

The author stresses that participation has an intrinsic value for the citizens. In addition, it is also important as a means of civic education, a process in which citizens learn civic values. A comparison of electoral participation in democratic polities shows great differences among them. The author argues that the level of voter turnout depends on a number of factors, such as the features of electoral law, the characteristics of social situation, voters’ motivation and political mobilization. Electoral law influences electoral participation in two ways: directly through legal provisions regulating the voting procedure and indirectly through basic characteristics of the electoral system, which more or less motivate the voters. The features of social situation that have an impact on voter turnout include importance of elections, voters’ emotional involvement and uncertainty of electoral outcome. Voters’ motivation depends on the type of individual involvement in politics, which ranges from a minority of political activists to a majority of political spectators, whose involvement is confined to voting, and a large number of apathetic citizens, who don’t care for politics at all. Electoral campaigns can be considered mainly as an instrument to mobilize the supporters of political parties, not the apathetic. In the second part of the article the author looks more closely into features of electoral participation or abstention in Croatia, based on empirical survey data from 1990 to 2003. His findings show that mainly two factors are important for the level of participation: the individual feeling of either helplessness or positive impact in politics and the sense of political responsibility. Unlike in most other democracies, socio-economic status doesn’t have a significant impact on participation in Croatia.