Municipal Turnout: The Challenge of the Local Level

While electoral participation and turnout are traditional topics in political science and their analysis at the national level is highly frequented, the same does not apply to the local level, especially in comparative perspective. This is indeed the goal of this book, presented by this first chapter in context of the existing literature. Local turnout has been usually investigated through two different and mutually exclusive approaches: the one seeing local elections as second-order (lower-rank approach) and the one considering them as bearer of peculiar territorial features different from the upper levels (different-kind approach). Starting from this evidence, the chapter outlines the main innovations of the book and its analytical and theoretical foundations. From an empirical point of view, it provides a comparative picture of local turnout in an extensive number of cases (18 country cases and over 70,000 municipalities). This allows to display sound results and to overcome one of the main flaws of the existing literature on municipal turnout, namely the absence of large comparative studies. From a methodological point of view, this chapter explains how the book focuses on the turnout variation (between municipal and national level) and not on the raw rates, thus going beyond the use of aggregate average data and providing a much more fine-grained inspection of turnout variations. From a theoretical point of view, the chapter illustrates how the book aims at bridging the two main theoretical approaches on local elections when it comes to address turnout increase or decrease. A further input of this first chapter is to provide an analytical framework for turnout by discussing its multilevel nature and its main drivers at the local level, which will examined thoroughly in the subsequent chapters.