The Source of Turnout Decline New Values or New Contexts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Voter turnout has consistently declined since the 1980s across a wide range of advanced democracies. Much of this decline appears to due to young people abstaining. In this paper we test two arguments for this trend. The first rests on the claim that the character of elections has changed; specifically that elections have become less competitive and that young people’s propensities for voting are particularly negatively affected by this. The second maintains that recent generations have different and that these value differences explain turnout declines. We test these two explanations using three different data sets: 1) individual level and election specific data from 83 elections in eight countries since the 1950s; 2) longitudinal individual level and district level data from British elections for the period 1974—2005; 3) panel data from American presidential elections. Our findings provide strong evidence for the generational value change argument while we find scant support for the competition argument.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".