Voting without a formed habit - Contextual effects on young citizens’ turnout decision

The habituation thesis of turnout assumes that voting is a routine, which is developed and strengthened over the life course (e.g. Plutzer 2002). Once citizens have established themselves as voters or abstainers, they simply follow this pattern during following elections. Naturally, young citizens who just became eligible to vote lack such a habit and consequently show higher volatility in turnout than older cohorts. Theoretically then, the lack of an established habit of voting or abstention makes young citizens especially susceptible to contextual effects. For instance, they may participate more likely in elections that are especially contested or accompanied by innovative or intense (media) campaigns. Scholars such as Franklin (2004) even argue that the general decline in turnout across established democracies follows from changes in institutional rules and elections’ character over the last decades, which had particularly strong (negative) effects on newer voting cohorts. Similarly, the not yet fully developed civic skills makes young citizens more prone to effects from the environment they live in (e.g. Harrop et al. 1991). Despite these arguments for contextual effects among young citizens, extant research has only scantly tackled the differential influence of contextual effects on turnout across age and related voting habits. Looking at the case of Switzerland, a country with one of the highest age turnout gaps (Fieldhouse et al. 2007), we test the claim of particularly strong contextual effects on turnout among younger citizens. Using registered turnout data across over 40 votes and examining both contextual variables from the campaigns and geographical environments, our multilevel, cross-classified models provide a comprehensive answer whether young voters are indeed more influenced by the context than the elder population, and if so by which contextual aspects.