Political culture's effect on voter turnout: the 2004 election and beyond

I provide an account of the psychological elements that combine within an actor, motivating them to vote. Political scientists have written extensively on the topic of turnout, however, no one has attempted to explain turnout based primarily on political culture. Political culture has improved our understanding of states, parties, and elections alike. This thesis uses a political culture ordinal scale as the primary explanatory variable in an OLS regression. Political culture has rarely been used as an explanatory variable and to my knowledge never as an ordinal scale, as it is used within this thesis. I posit that political culture, like a sense of civic duty, or any other “interpersonal influence” can and does become a motivating force in an actor’s decision to vote and acts as a long-term aggregate psychological influence in the act of voting and as. This relationship is explored via the use of data from the 2004 presidential election.