Regional variation in voter turnout in Europe: The impact of corruption perceptions

While much of the literature on voter turnout focuses on institutional and socioeconomic factors related to the 'input' side of the political process, we examine the 'output' side, and advance this field of research by studying the impact of corruption perceptions on turnout in the most recent national legislative elections across 170 European regions. Using data from a novel measure of regional perceived corruption of government services and the electoral process, together with several control variables, we find through multilevel modeling that regional quality of government positively impacts regional turnout. In more detail, our results indicate that citizens' perceptions of corruption make them, in the aggregate, less likely to cast a ballot. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.