The Meaning of Voting for Citizens: A Scientific Challenge, a Portrait, and Implications

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

On Election Day, citizens typically place a mark beside a party or candidate on a ballot paper. The possibility to cast this mark has been a historic conquest and today, voting is among the most frequent political acts for citizens. But what does that mark mean to them?

The Meanings of Voting for Citizens explores the diverse conceptualizations of voting among citizens in 13 countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The empirical evidence presented in this book is based on nearly a million words about voting from over 25,000 people using an open-ended survey and both qualitative and quantitative methods. The book’s innovative approach includes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical advancements, providing a comprehensive understanding of what voting means to citizens and how these meanings influence political engagement. The authors challenge assumptions about universal views on democracy and reveal how meanings of voting vary among individuals and across both liberal democracies and electoral autocracies. It also examines the implications of these meanings for political behaviour and election reforms.

The book is a critical reference for scholars of public opinion, behaviour, and democratization, as well as a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative political behaviour, empirical methods, and survey research. Practitioners working on election reforms will find it particularly relevant, offering insights into how citizens’ meanings of voting impact the effectiveness of electoral reforms.

Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu.

The series is edited by Nicole Bolleyer, Chair of Comparative Political Science, Geschwister Scholl Institut, LMU Munich and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.

Carolina Plescia, Associate Professor, University of Vienna

Carolina Plescia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2014. Her PhD won the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize. Currently she leads an ERC Starting Grant project. Previously she held a grant to study voters’ reactions to political compromise with the Austrian Science Fund. Her research has appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Political Science Research and Methods, and Political Psychology. She is the author of Split-ticket voting in mixed-member electoral systems: a theoretical and methodological investigation (ECPR press, 2016).