Local Electoral Participation in Europe: The Roots of Municipal Politics

While electoral participation is a traditional topic in political science, voter turnout at the local level is still largely uncharted. There are very few large-N comparative works on municipal turnout and, as a result, a lack of a comprehensive comparative picture of local electoral participation. This book aims to fill that gap by taking an innovative approach to the topic. The volume makes three major advances at the empirical, methodological and theoretical levels. Empirically, it provides a large-N comparison by covering 18 European countries and more than 70,000 municipalities. Methodologically, the book uses the multi-level congruence theory to study municipal turnout in relation to national turnout, exploring the variation between those levels. Theoretically, it bridges the two main (and often mutually exclusive) strands in the literature on local elections – the lower-rank and different-kind approaches – and it assesses the features and mechanisms of local voting.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Electoral turnout: the challenge at the local level.- Chapter 2: Between national and municipal: The European map of municipal electoral participation.- Chapter 3: What drives municipal-national differences in turnout? Towards a compounded explanation.- Chapter 4: Conclusion: what about local turnout?

About the Author :
Silvia Bolgherini is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Perugia, Italy. Her research interests include electoral studies, comparative political systems and local government. She has published widely on these topics in international journals and is a co-author of Germany after the Grand Coalition: Governance and Politics in a Turbulent Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Selena Grimaldi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Macerata, Italy. Her research interests include presidential studies, electoral studies, comparative political systems and local elites. She is the author of The Informal Powers of Western European Presidents: A Way out of Weakness? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Aldo Paparo is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence, Italy. His main research interests are elections and voting behaviour, with a particular focus on the local level. His research has appeared in Political Psychology, West European Politics, Electoral Studies, South European Society and Politics, Local Government Studies and Italian Political Science Review.