Total – Local – National: Estimating the Size of Three Categories of Voters

We analyze patterns of electoral turnout in local and national elections in Poland, distinguishing four categories of voters: total voters, who habitually participate in both kinds of election; local voters, who generally participate only in local elections, usually driven by personal knowledge of candidates; national voters, who generally participate only in national elections; and non-voters, who usually do not participate in either kind of elections. Raw turnout data only reveal the numbers corresponding to sums of those categories. Using detailed empirical data from all elections in this century and employing a theoretical model based on the Dirichlet distribution, we estimate the average number of total voters, and, on that basis, the average size of the other three categories in every municipality in Poland. We then test hypotheses regarding factors influencing their relative size (including demographic, sociological, historical, and political factors), and analyze how the unusual level of mobilization of national voters in the last local election of 2018, driven by rising party conflict, altered the usual patterns. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that the second-order election model cannot fully explain local elections in Poland, as there are significant subsets of the electorate that view local elections as first-order ones, being of either equal or greater importance to national ones. Finally, we compare the results obtained for Poland with preliminary results for a number of other countries in order to determine whether the conclusion described above is a local peculiarity or reveals a more general phenomenon.