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.