Mapping Municipal Turnout in Contemporary Europe

In this chapter we draw a comprehensive picture of municipal turnout in Europe. To do so, we compare the turnout levels in municipal election in different European countries, their variation in comparison with the national elections, and with respect to some country features. Moreover, we try to detect if, where, and to what extent some patterns emerge across Europe. After some methodological clarifications, which follow our theoretical reasoning in Chapter 1 , we compare the levels of electoral participation in the 18 European countries of our dataset, especially in relation to the size and the degree of urbanization of the municipalities. Then, we introduce the national elections as our baseline reference point, and we compare our countries by looking at the turnout variation between municipal and national elections—and again, in its relations with both size and urbanization. Subsequently, we provide a classification of the European countries in terms of the strength of the impact that size and urbanization have on their municipal elections—preliminary to the empirical assessment of their overall role in Chapter 3 . Finally, we analyse the electoral geography of municipal elections, by presenting and discussing municipal-level maps for both turnout levels and turnout variations in the most relevant cases emerging from our classification.