Elections and Participation: the Meanings of the Turnout Decline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is increasingly evident that the precipitous decline in voting turnout in the 2000 federal election to an historic low is rooted in social and political trends extending well beyond the specific context of that particular election. While there is a natural tendency to attribute the decline to the dominant position of the Liberals, the absence of meaningful party competition in many constituencies, or the lack of appeal of particular political leaders, there are many aspects of the decline which invite us to probe for deeper causes. The drop in turnout has been a prolonged one, falling in each of the last three federal elections – to 70% in 1993, 67% in 1997, and finally to 61% in the 2000 election. Voting turnout has been similarly declining in many other industrialized countries. In the 2001 British election, it dropped even more sharply, to a level (59%) even lower than that observed in Canada. As is seen in table 1, declines of varying magnitude have occurred in many established democracies over the past two decades, with large declines being recorded in countries as diverse as France, Austria, Ireland, Portugal and New Zealand. While there are a few exceptions to the general pattern, it is clear that the decline in turnout seems to have occurred in a range of different electoral systems, party configurations, and electoral environments. In beginning to investigate this phenomenon, we should consider hypotheses which are not necessarily specific to the Canadian political context
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".