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Virtuous villages and sinful cities? A spatial analysis into the effects of community characteristics on turnout and blank/invalid voting in local elections in Belgium 2006–2012

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Abstract

Does the size of a community influence political participation? Using spatial analysis, we investigate this question for the absolute level and change in local electoral turnout and invalid voting, using municipality-level data (N=588) from the 2006 and 2012 local elections in Belgium. The population size of a community has a clear negative effect on political participation, while area size matters far less and has a positive association. Compulsory voting in Belgium keeps young people showing up at elections, but with a higher likelihood of spoiling their vote. One of the main negative influences on participation is computer voting instead of paper and pencil ballots. Clear differences between the language communities in Belgium remain, after controlling for other community variables.

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Notes

  1. ‘It is man who creates kingdoms and republics, the village seems to be coming from the hands of God’.

  2. There is no specific research as to why most Belgians still feel voting is a duty even though enforcement has been abandoned long ago, while this is not the case in other countries with non-enforced CV. One argument can be the socializing effect of CV that continues to exert its effect (Bilodeau and Blais, 2011). Another – though tentative – explanation is that in the period immediately after the elections Belgian media report of people being fined in court because they were drafted to man polling stations and did not show up on the election day. It is possible that many citizens cannot see the distinction between these people, whose absence might be problematic to organize the election in a specific polling station and regular voters, thus keeping the idea alive that ‘fines are given for not showing up’.

  3. In many localities in Belgium electoral blocks are formed between parties that compete on the national level. There is also a tradition of having a ‘list of the mayor’ in many localities that will combine politicians that are part of the traditional political parties and a number of less affiliated candidates that only take part in the local election (Deschouwer, 2009). In medium-sized and large communities, the main parties will most often present their own list, but even here there can be exceptions.

  4. The smallest Belgian village (Herstappe) did not organize an election in 2006 because there was only one political party that wanted to take part in the elections.

  5. In its structural form, a spatial lag regression equation reads as Y=ρWY++ɛ, with ɛ~N(0, Ω) and Y as the outcome, ρWY as the spatial lag component, as the independent variables and ɛ as the error term. The spatial lag component is composed of a spatial coefficient ρ and a row-standardized spatial weights matrix (W), in our case a first order queen contiguity matrix, capturing the geographical structure of our observations.

  6. The structural form of the spatial error regression is Y=+λWɛ+μ, with μ~N(0, Ω) and Y as the outcome, as the independent variables, λWɛ as the spatial error component and μ as the homoscedastic error term. The spatial error component is composed of a spatial coefficient λ and a row-standardized spatial weights matrix (W), in our case a first order queen contiguity matrix, capturing the geographical structure of our observations.

  7. Although one could argue that population density might be a better indicator than the absolute population figure, in the Belgian case they are highly related, with a correlation of 0.7 for the natural logarithm of both indicators. Using both indicators would cause multicollinearity in the models.

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Dejaeghere, Y., Vanhoutte, B. Virtuous villages and sinful cities? A spatial analysis into the effects of community characteristics on turnout and blank/invalid voting in local elections in Belgium 2006–2012. Acta Polit 51, 80–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.38

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