‘Stay Woke: Vote’ claimed the Democrats in the 2020 US elections, in a campaign to encourage the participation of black youth. And for a good reason: to stop the growing abstention that affects both the United States and Spain and the rest of the world’s consolidated democracies. In fifty years of democratic history, electoral participation has fallen more than 10 points.
Since the end of 1960, the level of participation in legislative or presidential elections has gone from 75% to 63%, on average, according to data compiled by La Vanguardia. The generational change and the proliferation of electoral appointments —through referendums and territorial disaggregation— have shaped new patterns of political participation that are much more fluctuating depending on the context.
The examples are multiple. In Spain, the 2019 electoral repetition achieved a milestone of abstentionism, the highest percentage since the beginning of democracy. In France, the second round of the presidential elections left the lowest number of participation since 1970 when a part of the moderate electorate abstained from voting between the continuity of Macron or the alternative of Le Pen.
In contrast, in the 2020 US presidential elections, the delicate context forced electoral mobilization and set the record in a presidential election with 66% participation. Both the 2019 event in Spain and the 2022 event in France and the 2020 event in the United States perfectly exemplify the political attitude of citizens after this generational change.
Whereas before citizens would vote under any circumstances, more and more go to the polls only when they feel that something can change or there are factors at play.
Behind this behavior there is a change in the perception of democracy that has gone from being a milestone to a consolidated reality that is taken for granted. The economic development linked to it has conditioned the way in which the last generations have grown up and socialized. Especially and in a generalized way among citizens born from the 1980s and earlier in some countries such as the United States that began economic development before Europe.
“The new generations are much more sensitive to the context and can mobilize in a timely manner when the stakes are high,” explains Filip Kostelka, professor at the European University Institute specializing in political participation and one of the authors of the most comprehensive academic analysis on political participation. the question.
It concludes that it is these two factors—generational change and the number of elections—that are the main instigators of this increase and not political disaffection or current globalization. “It is not that they are not politically active, but that they also participate in other ways, such as through protests,” Kostelka details.
Certain scenarios, such as electoral repetition, favor demobilization while others, such as the possibility of forcing a change of government, can produce the opposite effect. This is what happened in 2020 in the United States, when the threat of four more years of Donald Trump motivated even the most reluctant population to go to the polls.
Far from posing a threat to the survival of the democratic system —turnout drops but the majority of the population continues to vote—, high rates of abstention have a direct impact on democratic health. On the one hand, it increases inequality and on the other, governments invest only to satisfy their electorate.
When there is high abstention, the first to not go to the polls are those citizens who have worse socioeconomic conditions and, consequently, the result benefits only part of the population. In addition, politicians feel less pressured by public scrutiny and this favors the promotion of policies aimed at benefiting a part of their electorate instead of general measures that serve society as a whole.
Although the trend indicates that participation will continue to plummet in the coming years, there are also contextual factors that could produce the opposite effect. The threat of climate change or the rise of the extreme right may become the necessary elements of pressure to mobilize the electorate in the next decade.
