The challenge now is to distil an overall explanation of abstention, writesRichard Sinnott
Last Wednesday the CSO published initial results from the largest study yet of voter participation and abstention in Irish elections. Based on a huge sample (over 24,000 respondents), the survey provides unprecedented evidence on the socio-demographic, attitudinal and behavioural characteristics of voters and non-voters.
When fully analysed, this survey will go a long way towards identifying the sources of the growing problem of voter abstention (see graph). Many of the pointers to the sources of abstention were reported in last Thursday's Irish Times and can be inspected in the CSO release (www.CSO.ie).
The challenge now is to distil an overall explanation of abstention from the wide range of attributes of voters and non-voters documented in the survey. The strong relationship between age and participation/ abstention (see graph) illustrates the nature of the problem.
Turnout among 18- to 19-year-olds in 2002 was 40 per cent. It rose to 53 per cent among 20- to 24-year-olds and 66 per cent among 25- to 34-year-olds*. In contrast, turnout was 80 per cent or more in the various older age groups, only tailing off slightly among the over-75s.
The problem is that this finding, important as it is, raises as many questions as it answers, the central one being: what is it about being young that leads to lower turnout (bearing in mind that "young" here includes not just the under-25s but also those between 25 and 34)?
Answering this question involves recognising that there are two kinds of abstention, circumstantial and voluntary. While this distinction is not absolute, it points to a further and crucial difference between factors that facilitate participation and factors that mobilise participation.
Both sets of factors can be either attributes of institutions and of social and political processes or attributes of individuals. This line of thinking leads to a four-fold typology of the sources of participation and abstention that is the key to both understanding the causes of the growing problem of voter abstention and to devising policy responses to deal with it.
The implications of this approach can be seen by applying it to the relationship between age and turnout. Young people tend to score low on voter facilitation.
This is partly because they are residentially mobile and so are less likely to be registered at all or to be registered where they are living. Those among them who are still studying have a cyclical pattern of work pressure that makes June a bad month for voting.
Furthermore and still in terms of the facilitation of participation, young people are less likely to be regular consumers of media coverage of politics and current affairs and are therefore less likely to have that familiarity with politics and political issues that, among older people, makes voting easy.
Young people however are also low on political mobilisation. They are less likely to feel any sense of identification with or attachment to political parties and are also less likely to believe that it is important which parties or which candidates win more or fewer seats in an election.
The task in further analysing the data from the survey will be to assess the relative weight of these various age-related facilitation and mobilisation effects and to apply the same line of inquiry to the relationship between participation and social class, participation and levels of education etc.
Political mobilisation (and aspects of voter facilitation) involve long-term processes of political learning, i.e. learning why politics matters and what the choices and their implications are.
This is something that does not just happen in a three-week period every four or five years. Instead it is a continuous and cumulative but naturally slow process.
The danger is that, with all the distractions and pressures of contemporary society and with the disappearance of the simple certitudes that politics once offered, the political learning process may slow down to the point of failure.
This would leave whole generations with at best an arm's-length relationship to the political process and a permanent tendency towards higher levels of abstention.
An important part of the story in the CSO survey is that contrary to a frequently articulated view, disillusionment with politics is not the main cause of abstention.
Only 10 per cent explicitly cited disillusionment with politics as their reason for not voting and only 6 per cent of under-25s did so. Seventy per cent of respondents said they were at least fairly satisfied with the workings of democracy in Ireland.
Moreover, as the table above shows, there is no difference between voters and non-voters in terms of their belief in the honesty of politicians.
There is a difference between voters and non-voters in their belief that politicians care about the opinions of ordinary people, but voters and non-voters are more likely to differ in their confidence that they have an understanding of the political issues and in believing that it matters which parties win seats.
In short, fundamental failures of political facilitation (i.e. developing a sense of understanding of the issues) and political mobilisation (i.e. convincing citizens that it matters which parties win or lose) would seem to be more important sources of abstention than disillusionment as such.
The breadth and depth of this survey puts it at the international forefront of studies of this type. In undertaking it, the CSO was venturing on new territory and was encouraged in doing so by the combined support of the minister for the environment and local government at the time, Mr Dempsey, and of the spokespersons on these matters from the various political parties.
In order to ensure that the rich data set generated by these efforts is fully exploited, a team of researchers at UCD's Institute for the Study of Social Change is, with the aid of a research grant from the Irish Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, embarking on a major study of electoral participation using this survey and other sources.
Pending the outcome of this full analysis of the data, last week's CSO release gives politicians, party and community activists, and policy makers much to think about.
*Because the survey overestimates turnout by about 13 percentage points, these proportions need to be correspondingly scaled back to give accurate estimates of the rate of voting by different age groups.
This would not affect the relative differences between groups, which is the point of most interest. The over-reporting of turnout is universal in studies of this sort and will be taken into account in the final analysis of the data.
Prof Richard Sinnott is director of the Public Opinion and Political Behaviour Research Programme at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UCD