Voters' resources and electoral participation in Latin America

Abstract

Previous studies of electoral participation in Latin America have focused on the political and institutional factors that influence country differences in the aggregate level of turnout. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the individual-level socio-economic factors that have an impact on citizens propensity to vote. We assess the relevance of voters resources to explain electoral participation in Latin America. We demonstrate that the demographic characteristics of voters (age and education) are strong predictors of electoral participation in Latin America. Our analysis reveals that the individual objective characteristics of the voters explain much more than individual subjective motivations and mobilization networks.