Has the gender gap in voter turnout really disappeared?

According to conventional wisdom, the traditional gender gap in voting has disappeared or even reversed in most established democracies. Drawing on the existing literature on sex differences in political engagement and on pioneering voter turnout theories, this article questions the conventional assumption and hypothesises that women still participate at lower rates in less important elections. It systematically tests this hypothesis by exploring the impact of sex on voter turnout in different electoral arenas. The empirical analyses of two cross-national datasets (Making Electoral Democracy Work and the European Election Study) demonstrate that although there is generally no gender gap in first-order elections, women tend to vote less than men in second-order contests. This reflects women’s weaker interest in politics and their lower levels of knowledge about politics in second-order electoral arenas

Deriving a forecast model for European election turnout

Turnout is a key indicator in European Parliament elections, in the absence of a direct executive outcome. Forecasting turnout is an important exercise in requiring the identification of a parsimonious model with good lead time from the array of structural, demographic and attitudinal variables employed in rich explanatory models of turnout, and simultaneously minimising prediction error. Building on a series of regression models using aggregate data, this paper explores the applicability of such an approach to turnout in the EU-27 countries, and considers the explanatory added value which deriving such a forecast model can also provide