Does Political Information Influence Voter Turnout at the Municipal Level?

• In Event: Understanding Municipal Elections: New Data and Approaches from Canada

Abstract

In North America, voter turnout at the municipal level is generally much lower than at other levels of government. This weak mobilization is often attributed to a weaker circulation and lower quality of political information compared with other levels of government. To our knowledge, however, no study has examined this informational context and its impact on individual electoral participation at the municipal level. In other words, the influence of the informational context is postulated but has not been subject to empirical verifications. As a classic theme in political science, the relationship between the political information available to an elector and his electoral participation has, however, been studied at length for the higher levels of government. For example, the democratic ideal according to which the citizen ought to be fully informed in order to make an informed choice has given rise to the concept of “political sophistication,” widely used in the English-speaking context, or “political competence” (compétence politique) for French-speaking contexts. Whatever the term given to this phenomenon, the level of political knowledge is considered to be the best indicator of voter competence. At the municipal level, the absence of research on the political competence of the elector is explained primarily by the fact that most electoral analyses of the municipal scale are based on aggregated data, thereby precluding access to knowledge about the relationship between the voter, his choice to go to the polls or not, and the political information he has.

The purpose of this article is to address this gap and to measure the impact which information has on municipal electoral political participation at the individual level. In our opinion, this is the first analysis, for the province of Quebec, that is based on individual electoral data. Based on the administration of a representative survey of the populations of four types of municipalities distinguished according to size of population and conducted province-wide in November 2017 (n=3200), the study tests, using different logistic regression models, a number of assumptions about the nature of the information as well as the feeling of being sufficiently informed. We show that political information directly influences individual electoral participation in addition to moderating the effect of several other variables, such as age and interest in politics. The effect of the information is constant regardless of the type of municipality size. More specifically, the feeling of being sufficiently informed and knowledge about the platforms of the candidate for mayor and the candidate for city councillor are all variables that influence the decision to go to the poll. Going beyond the more traditional analyses aimed at measuring an individual’s political competence based on a knowledge test, our study explores a new way of measuring the impact of political information on voting.

Authors

• Sandra BREUX

• Jérôme Couture, Université Laval