The voter turnout puzzles

Abstract

The study of voter turnout is bedeviled by a number of puzzles, some of which also are found in other areas of political research. Other topics, however, seldom see so many apparently intractable puzzles all at the same time. In this article I enumerate the puzzles and describe each of them briefly. My argument is that in studying voter turnout we need to solve most if not all of these puzzles in order to make progress on the more fundamental questions of why turnout is declining in established democracies and whether this decline matters.