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Turning Out or Turning Off: Do Mobilization and Attitudes Account for Turnout Differences between New and Established Member States at the 2004 EP Elections?

Abstract How can we understand the low turnout seen in the 2004 European Parliament elections? One possibility would be that new member states were ‘just different’ either because of the post‐communist legacy in some of them or because of an unexplicated ‘low propensity to vote’ in some of those. This article explicates the low propensity to vote in some post‐communist countries by means of a general model of turnout that applies also to established EU member states. In this model low turnout is accounted for by party loyalties on the one hand, and affective and instrumental reasons for voting on the other. The latter factors are found to be lacking in European Parliament elections, which can nevertheless see high turnout due to party loyalty or compulsory voting. Where both of these are absent we see particularly low turnout, as we did in five of the new member countries in 2004.