Political interest, cognitive ability and personality: Determinants of voter turnout in Britain

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 291-310

  Denny, Kevin ^a,b   Doyle, Orla ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

^b INSTITUTE FOR FISCAL STUDIES   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48849109681     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340800015X     Document Type: Article

References (108)

1. For a review of the literature on voter turnout, see Norman H. Nie, Jane Junn and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
2. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone, Who Votes? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980);
3. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993);
4. Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Citizenship in America;
5. Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart and Paul F. Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
6. See Thomas S. Dee, 'Are There Civic Returns to Education?' Journal of Public Economics, 88 (2004), 1697-720;
7. Kevin Milligan, Enrico Moretti and Philip Oreopoulos, 'Does Education Improve Citizenship? Evidence from the US and the UK', Journal of Public Economics, 88 (2004), 1667-95.
8. Robert C. Luskin, 'Explaining Political Sophistication', Political Behavior, 12 (1990), 331-61;
9. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995);
10. Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America;
11. W. Russell Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics: Knowledge and Opinion in the American Electorate (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986);
12. Seth M. Hauser, 'Education, Ability, and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States', Social Science Research, 29 (2002), 556-82.
13. Alain van Hiel, Malgorata Kossowska and Ivan Mervielde, 'The Relationship between Openness to Experience and Political Ideology', Personality and Individual Differences, 28 (2000), 741-51.
14. Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbarnelli and Philip G. Zimbardo, 'Personality Profiles and Political Parties', Political Psychology, 20 (1999), 175-97.
15. Carol Elshaug and Jacque Metzer, 'Personality Attributes of Volunteers and Paid Workers Engaged in Similar Occupational Tasks', Journal of Social Psychology, 141 (2001), 752-63;
16. Gustovo Carlo, Morris A. Okun, George P. Knight and Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, 'The Interplay of Traits and Motives on Volunteering: Agreeableness, Extraversion and Prosocial Values Motivation', Personality and Individual Differences, 38 (2005), 1293-305.
17. Acevedo and Krueger, in discussing the Voter's Illusion and the Personal Relevance hypotheses, argue that individuals vote because they derive psychological benefits from voting. See Melissa Acevedo and Joachim I. Krueger, 'Two Egotropic Sources of the Decision to Vote: The Voter's Illusion and the Belief in Personal Relevance', Political Psychology, 25 (2004), 115-34.
18. See Valentino Larcinese, 'Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout: Theory and Evidence from Britain' (London School of Economics and Political Science Working Paper, 2002);
19. David Dreyer Lassen, 'The Effect of Information on Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Natural Experiment', American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), 103-18.
20. M. Kent Jennings and Richard G. Niemi, Generations and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
21. Other theories of voter turnout include the perceived equity-fairness model, the social capital model, the civic voluntarism model, the cognitive mobilization model and the minimal rational choice model (see Clarke et al., Political Choice in Britain, pp. 217-35).
22. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Donald E. Stokes and Warren E. Miller, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960);
23. Wolfinger and Rosen, Who Votes? Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America.
24. Wolfinger and Rosen, Who Votes?
25. David E. Campbell, 'Vote Early, Vote Often', Education Next (Summer 2005), 32-69.
26. Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America.
27. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality.
28. Russell J. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House Publishers, 2002).
29. Martin P. Wattenberg, Where Have All the Voters Gone? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002);
30. Clarke et al., Political Choice in Britain.
31. Larcinese, 'Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout'.
32. Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston, 'A Low Turnout Landslide: Abstention at the British General Election of 1997', Political Studies, 49 (2001), 286-305.
33. Dee, 'Are There Civic Returns to Education?' Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos, 'Does Education Improve Citizenship?'.
34. Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos, 'Does Education Improve Citizenship?'.
35. Luskin, Explaining Political Sophistication;
36. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality;
37. Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Citizenship in America;
38. Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics;
39. Hauser, 'Education, Ability, and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States'. Note that these studies all concern the United States; to date, no study has investigated the link between ability and political behaviour in Europe.
40. Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America;
41. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality.
42. Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics.
43. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994, p. 253).
44. Luskin, 'Explaining Political Sophistication'. 28 Kevin Denny, 'The Effects of Human Capital on Social Capital: A Cross-Country Analysis' (UCD Economics working paper 03/20, July 2003).
45. Hauser, 'Education, Ability, and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States'.
46. Gerrit Muller and Erik Plug, 'Estimating the Effect of Personality on Male-Female Earnings', Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 59 (2006), 3-22;
47. Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne, 'The Determinants of Earnings: A Behavioural Approach', Journal of Economic Literature, 39 (2001), 1137-76;
48. Melissa Osborne-Groves, 'How Important is your Personality? Labor Market Returns to Personality for Women in the US and UK', Journal of Economic Psychology, 26 (2005), 827-41;
49. Ellen K. Nyhus and Empar Pons, 'The Effect of Personality on Earnings', Journal of Economic Psychology, 26 (2005), 363-84.
50. Caprara, Barbaranelli and Zimbardo, 'Personality Profiles and Political Parties'.
51. Van Hiel, Kossowska and Mervielde, 'The Relationship between Openness to Experience and Political Ideology';
52. Alain van Hiel, Ivan Mervielde and Filip De Fruyt, 'The Relationship between Maladaptive Personality and Right-wing Ideology', Personality and Individual Differences, 36 (2004), 405-17;
53. P. D. Trapnell, 'Openness versus Intellect: A Lexical Left Turn', European Journal of Personality, 8 (1994), 273-90;
54. R. Riemann, C. Grubich, S. Hempel, S. Mergl and M. Richter, 'Personality and Attitudes Towards Current Political Topics', Personality and Individual Differences, 15 (1993), 313-21;
55. R. R. McCrae, 'Social Consequences of Experimental Openness', Psychological Bulletin, 120 (1996), 323-37.
56. James H. Fowler and Cindy D. Kam, 'Patience as a Political Virtue? Delayed Gratification and Turnout', Political Behaviour, 28 (2006), 113-28.
57. Elshaug and Metzer, 'Personality Attributes of Volunteers and Paid Workers'.
58. Carlo et al., 'The Interplay of Traits and Motives on Volunteering'.
59. The majority of the above studies use the classic 'Five-Factor' Model which Van Hiel et al. describe as 'a dimensional representation of personality structures referring to Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to experience'. See Van Hiel, Kossowska and Mervielde, 'The Relationship between Openness to Experience and Political Ideology', p. 742.
60. See Sanjay Srivastava, Oliver P. John, Jeff Potter and Samuel D. Gosling, 'Development of Personality in Early and Middle Adulthood: Set like Plaster or Persistent Change?' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84 (2003), 1041-53.
61. However, there is a substantial body of evidence pointing to stability of personality over time though it is less pronounced among younger adults, see Wendy Johnson, Matt McGue and Robert F. Krueger, 'Personality Stability in Later Adulthood: A Behavioral Genetic Analysis', Journal of Personality, 73 (2005), 523-51, for example.
62. John R. Alford, Carolyn L. Funk and John R. Hibbing, 'Genes, Political Orientations, and Social Personality' (paper presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, 2005);
63. John R. Alford, Carolyn L. Funk and John R. Hibbing 'Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?' American Political Science Review, 99 (2005), 153-67.
64. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality;
65. Geraint Parry, George Moyser and Neil Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
66. Timothy J. Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 'The Swing Voter's Curse', American Economic Review, 86 (1996), 408-24.
67. John G. Matsusaka, 'Explaining Voter Turnout Patterns: An Information Theory', Public Choice, 84 (1995), 91-117.
68. Larcinese, 'Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout';
69. Lassen, 'The Effect of Information on Voter Turnout'.
70. James R. Tilley, Patrick Sturgis and Nick Allum, 'Political Information and Motivation: A Case of Reciprocal Causality?' (paper presented at symposium on 'Perceptions preferences and rationalization: overcoming the problem of causal inference in the study of political behaviour', Nuffield College, Oxford, 2004).
71. Clarke et al., Political Choice in Britain.
72. Pattie and Johnston, 'A Low Turnout Landslide'.
73. Andrew Russell, Edward Fieldhouse, Virinder Kalra and Kingsley Purdam, Young People and Voter Engagement in Britain (London: Electoral Commission, 2002).
74. Pippa Norris, 'Will New Technology Boost Turnout? Evaluating Experiments in UK Local Elections', in Norbert Kersting and Harald Baldersheim, eds, Electronic Voting and Democracy: A Comparative Analysis (London: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 183-225.
75. David Kerr, 'England's Teenagers Fail the Patriotic Test: The Lessons from England's Participation in the IEA Civic Education Study' (Political and Citizenship Education: International Perspectives), Oxford Studies in Comparative Education, 14 (2005), 29-47.
76. Milligan, Moretti and Oreopoulos, 'Does Education Improve Citizenship?;
77. Larcinese, 'Information Acquisition, Ideology and Turnout'.
78. While the NCDS dataset contains information on the voting behaviour of the cohort over time, we focus on the 1997 British general election as it experienced the lowest turnout in the post-war period of 71 per cent (turnout continued to fall in the 2001 election where only 59.4 per cent of the electorate voted). British electoral participation until recent years has been high compared to other advanced democracies, according to Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart and Paul F. Whiteley, 'Britain (Not) at the Polls, 2001', Political Science & Politics, 36 (2003), 59-64, average turnout in Britain between 1945 until 1997 has been 76 per cent.
79. Anthony Heath and Brigit Taylor, 'New Sources of Abstention?' in Geoffrey Evans and Pippa Norris, eds, Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-Term Perspective (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 165-80.
80. Kevin Swaddle and Anthony Heath, 'Official and Reported Turnout in the British General Election of 1987', British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), 537-51.
81. Denise Hawkes and Ian Plewis, 'Modelling Non-response in the National Child Development Study', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 169 (2006), 479-91.
82. E. Ferri, Life at 33: The Fifth Follow-Up of the National Child Development Study (London: National Children's Bureau, 1993).
83. Another common factor influencing voter turnout is party identification. A number of studies have found that individuals with strong partisan attachments are more likely to vote compared to those with weak partisan attachments (see J. M. Sabucedo and D. Cramer, 'Sociological and Psychological Predictors of Voting in Great Britain', Journal of Social Psychology, 13 (1991), 647-54;
84. Mark N. Franklin, 'Electoral Participation', in Laurence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris, eds, Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective (London: Sage, 1996). However, as a variable capturing strength of partisan attachment is not included in the NCDS survey we cannot include it in the empirical analysis.
85. Parry, Moyser and Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain;
86. Ivor Crewe, 'Electoral Participation', in David Butler, Howard R. Penniman and Austin Ranney, eds, Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1981), pp. 216-63.
87. The parental class variable is based on seven categories: Professional, Intermediate, Skilled non-manual, Skilled manual, Semi-skilled non-manual, Semi-skilled manual and Unskilled manual. The original variable was recoded such that higher values represent a higher social class. Note that this scale does not separately report the self-employed.
88. While the literature on party choice in Britain often explicitly examines regional effects (e.g. Dorren McMahon, Anthony Heath Martin Harrop and John Curtice, 'The Electoral Consequences of North-South Migration', British Journal of Political Science, 22 (1992), 419-43), due to the historical dominance of certain parties in particular regions, in this article we abstract from this issue and hence do not report the coefficients on the regional dummies.
89. We use this measure as a proxy for civic duty as the more standard measures of civic duty, which typically include attitudes towards voting, are not available.
90. Using the 'dprobit' routine in STATA 9.
91. Sabucedo and Cramer, 'Sociological and Psychological Predictors of Voting in Great Britain';
92. Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, 'Britain (Not) at the Polls'.
93. Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, 'Britain (Not) at the Polls';
94. David Butler and Donald E. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (New York: St Martin's Press, College edition, 1971).
95. A variable capturing whether the respondent has children was also included in the initial regression specification but, as it failed to be statistically significant, it was excluded from the final analysis.
96. Pattie and Johnston, 'A Low Turnout Landslide'.
97. Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik and Jim Alt, 'Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964-1974', British Journal of Political Science, 7 (1977), 129-90;
98. Crewe, 'Electoral Participation'.
99. Caprara, Barbarnelli and Zimbardo, 'Personality Profiles and Political Parties'.
100. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1963).
101. Verba, Schlozman and Brady, Voice and Equality;
102. Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America;
103. Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics.
104. See Stephen Knack, 'Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout', Rationality and Society, 4 (1992), 133-56;
105. Stephen Knack and Marta E. Kropf, 'For Shame! The Effect of Community Cooperative Context on the Probability of Voting', Political Psychology, 19 (1998), 585-99.
106. David Kerr, 'Promoting Active Citizenship in Schools and Communities in England: Emerging Lessons from Policy, Practice and Research', in Bart Maes, ed., Different Faces of Citizenship Development of Citizenship Education in European Countries (Brussels: CIDREE, 2005), pp. 93-125.
107. This can be achieved by examining the correlation coefficient reported with the bivariate probit model.
108. Russell, Fieldhouse, Kalra and Purdam, Young People and Voter Engagement in Britain.