Understanding Voter Turnout in Canada: What Data Do We Lack?

• Author: Achen, Christopher H.

Voter turnout, particularly among youth, has been in decline over the past few decades. Federal officials have expressed concern about this trend. Although they have sought help from researchers to understand the reasons for the lack of participation in hopes of reversing it, scholars lack some of the information they need to confidently advise policymakers and their fellow citizens on how to get more ballots cast. In this article, the author outlines the main factors/variables which explain voter turnout. He then explains why researchers require supplementary information that only official government records can supply to properly consider these variables. Two sources of official information are highlighted as being particularly relevant--official turnout records and unemployment surveys with a voting supplement. The author concludes by offering three recommendations for how to make this information available to researchers while still taking steps to protect Canadians' privacy.

Introduction (1)

Like most democracies in recent decades, Canada has experienced a decline in turnout (see figure 1). Voting among Canadian youth has fallen particularly dramatically. When turnout falls, both the representativeness of the electorate and the legitimacy of election outcomes come under scrutiny. Federal officials have expressed concern, and for a decade and a half, Elections Canada has commissioned research on the topic, including repeated special surveys on youth turnout beginning with Pammett and LeDuc in 2003 and continuing to 2015. (2) Thus, turnout matters both as a research puzzle and as a policy issue. Yet understanding the decline, particularly among younger voters, continues to challenge scholars. (3)

At present, a lack of relevant data blocks researchers from confidently advising policymakers and fellow citizens on how to get more citizens to cast a vote. We simply do not have the information we need. This article reviews the problem, with an emphasis on Canada and to a lesser degree on the United States. However, the problem is familiar in the rest of the democratic world as well.

The Main Factors in Voter Turnout

The standard variables in use in turnout studies of individual voters fall into three broad categories:

1. The turnout decision itself. Did the citizen cast a ballot?

2. Demographic variables. Here we include the classics known to predict turnout, especially age and education, along with a variety of other factors such as residential location, income, gender, race and ethnicity, religious preference and church attendance, union membership, and other group affiliations.

3. Attitudinal variables. A citizen's sense of civic duty and the strength of preference for candidates are the most powerful factors influencing turnout, a finding that dates to Riker and Ordeshook. (4) Policy views, candidate evaluations, partisanship and partisan strength, media consumption, information levels, and a host of other variables all matter to some degree.

Academic election surveys, notably the Canadian Election Study, include all these variables. However, these surveys on their own are insufficient. They need supplementary information that only official government records can supply, as the next sections explain. Two sources of official information are particularly relevant--official turnout records and unemployment surveys with a voting supplement. The next two sections take them up in turn.

Why Official Turnout Records Are Needed

In the great majority of academic studies, turnout is measured by asking the citizen in a post-election interview whether she voted ("reported vote"). In many internet surveys, finding people post-election is deemed too difficult, and the citizen's pre-election "intention to vote" is used instead. Only a handful of studies have used the official government record of whether the citizen cast a ballot ("validated vote"). (6)

Vote intentions and reported votes each have well known problems. Good intentions (to lose weight, to quit smoking, and to get to the polls) often fail. (7) Reported votes are also unreliable in every democracy. (8) As many as one quarter of nonvoters falsely report that they voted ("misreport"), inducing substantial error in the turnout measure. Overreport - the combination of misreport plus the greater willingness of more politically engaged citizens to be interviewed--has grown worse, making reported turnout rates in the Canadian Election Study now more than 20 points higher than the actual rate. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, reported vote was not too misleading, (9) but trusting it has become more difficult in recent years. (10) In consequence, Gidengil et al. (11)omitted a planned chapter on turnout from their book on recent Canadian elections. (12) Without knowing who in the survey had actually voted, the researchers were stymied.

Thus, validated vote is the gold standard, the only genuinely reliable source of turnout information. However, to make use of official vote records, scholars must have access to them. That is currently impossible in Canada.

Official Canadian eligible voter files are treated as confidential, almost as state secrets. In contrast to Britain and the United States, Canada does not make them available even to political parties, and certainly not to academic researchers, not even in redacted form with no identifying information. Moreover, the record of who voted is not recorded in the voter file itself, and turnout information is destroyed within one year after each election, as specified in the Canada Elections Act. Thus in Canada, even the voter files do not include validated turnout information. In consequence, there has never been a comprehensive voter turnout survey in Canada with validated votes. Even when...