Electoral Participation: Public Choice And Abstentionism

Electoral participation: Public choice and abstentionism

Democracy in Latin America is confronted with several challenges. Among them, there are the enormous expectations that citizens associate with this political regime, renewed with each election, with each candidate who is able to win the voting vote with their promises of a better tomorrow. Faced with the expectations created, the performance of democracy, that is, the ruling political elite, is very behind, phenomenon that derives – in the scope of citizens’ reactions – in frustration and disaffection. Maintaining the precision of the terms, abstentionism does not mean refraining from political participation but of voting. Political participation may well be specified by other means.

As regards its motivation, abstentionism can express a will to dissent or protest, with the political system or with some aspect of it. It is also thoughtful as a symptom of apathy, caused by a "hopeless" or ‘satisfied’ disinterest. Abstentionism can also be the result of a rational calculation, that is, a result of a participation in the modality conceived by the neoliberal approach of a selfish calculation of costs and benefits that each citizen performs. Most of the time, abstentionism is interpreted rather as a way of expressing discomfort with politics in general, thus gaining political significance in a strict sense. The analysis that remains in this exegesis of the ‘reproach’ sins however by one -dimensional. Such interpretive automatism becomes ostensible above all in the mass media, where abstentionism is usually used as an indicator of dissatisfaction with and delegitimization of the political system.

While in the social sciences are very careful when deducting (hidden) motivations of behaviors (visible), journalism shows at this point – not rarely – the courage of naive. 

Taking into account the characteristic complexity of every social phenomenon, it is more plausible – and in my opinion more reasonable – from a multiplicity of factors on which abstentionism depends, among which the following types and examples can be distinguished: Structural factors:

• The electorate composition taking into account the existence of ethnic cultures 
• THE ELECTORATE EDUCATION LEVEL
• The characteristics of political culture in general 7
• the conception of the vote by the electorate, for example as a right or as a duty

 Contingent factors:

• Impossibility of the voter/the voter to attend the vote (due to illness or due to distance issues)
• Criteria for the rational choice (Rating Choice) -Type of choice -fecto of the choice -cantity of organs to be occupied 

Intrinsic factors to electoral law: 

• Voter registration mode (automatic or special) 
• Characteristics of the electoral system (magnitude of the natural and artificial barriers it contains, the simplicity of the electoral ballot)
• Factors related to the political system: 
• The type of competition between parties 
• The degree of mobilization of the electorate through the programs (of greater or lesser polarization among them) 
• Outgoing government performance 
• the expectations linked to the candidates that arise 

This list of factors that does not intend to be complete, makes it clear that it is risky to venture to the determination of the causes of abstentionist behavior. This, reduced to a numerical expression at the end of the electoral day and temporary or geographical perspective, that is, historically or internationally compared, it runs the risk of being analytically disconnected from its true genesis.

Regarding local development or its relevance in discourse, it arises not as a strategy to social demands for social welfare, but rather product of the insufficiency of traditional development models of the central state. Local development advocates a local culture or greater autonomy that bases its precepts on a force of the "place". This is the recognition of an active solidarity space in which communities have a set of economic, human, environmental, institutional and cultural resources that constitute the endogenous development potential.

However, in the case of our country there has not been a true political will on the part of the authorities or a true collective empowerment of citizens in decision making at the local level beyond the exercise of the vote. The problem that exists in our country is not only oriented to a problem of political representativeness at the local level, but also in practice true participation processes. Well, although there are, for example, associations of communal development, these forms of organization, "are influenced by political, electoral interests oriented by state paternalism" (Vargas, 2003, p.26). Thus, the connection between citizens and municipalities remains very dim to date.

In addition, certain aspects are still recurring at the local level that prevent an authentic involvement of citizenship such as the absence of truthful information about the performance of the authorities, a fact that does not contribute to citizen training or political legitimacy. There are also lags in strengthening the share capital, not only in reference to the predominance of particular interests on community, but most projects are foreseen for a short term. Regarding this last point, in the country, the dynamics of decision -making at the local level continue to reflect little opening to diverse actors and organizations. In addition to the above is the level of human development of the different population areas, which could contribute to the lack of citizenship participation in the election of local authorities.

Abstentionism and Human Development Index

To talk about abstentionism, it is important to think about why the population is driven to vote. According to Mark Franklin in his 2007 article The Dynamics of Electoral Participation, there are three theoretical explanations for electoral participation, namely: 

Individual resources: 

• those people who have the knowledge, wealth and time to do it vote. However, in his work Franklin notes that the differences in these variables largely do not explain the variations in participation. 
• Political mobilization by parties, media and other groups. 
• The instrumental motivation, that is, voters vote since they believe that by vote they can alter the result of the elections, considering that with their vote they can win politicians who will put into practice specific public policies, desired by voters. Regarding these three theories, we have to: “… The instrumental approach to electoral electoral participation to the other two two two common approaches scholause it Largely subsumes Them Bot, While Explanting Additional Aspects That Neithy of the Other Approaches Can Address”. 

For this reason, in this work it is based on the fact that citizens become voters seeking to implement public policies that reflect their demands. To know what these desired public policies will be, the perspective exposed by Downs is also taken into account in their already classic economic theory of political action in a democracy, according to which: “citizens vote according to: a) Variationsthat causes government activity in its usefulness or income, and b) the alternatives offered by the opposition ”and“ the utility or income that voters receive from government activity depends on the actions taken by the Government during their mandate ”. 

Thus, citizens vote for rulers to execute public policies that most increase their usefulness (it is preferred to speak only of this, and not of rent, because by definition the utility includes both income and other non -monetizable benefits). On the other hand, Dieter Nohlen develops in his 2004 work the electoral participation as an object of study Elections four criteria on which the electoral participation can be analyzed, these are: degree of social inequality, orientation of participatory culture in the State Disjunction -society, centrality of the representative system and degree of confidence in institutions. The degree of social inequality is the criterion that stands out in importance since it indicates that the social economic issue plays an important role in the way in which people and more specifically citizens behave electorally, which allows us to consider the development indexHuman a valid tool to build our observation. Human Development Index (HDI) means a measure of economic and social development that combines life expectancy indicators (understand health, education and income)). 

There are reasons to suspect that there is a relationship between the components of the HDI and electoral participation. For example, with respect to income we have to “(the) technical or structural abstentionism tends to be important to social inequality, to the extent that the problems of registration and access to the polls tend to systematically affect themost disadvantaged sectors of society, in socio -economic, age, educational, ethnic, gender and regional terms ”.

 In turn, there is evidence that the economic situation affects the behavior of long -term voters: “Using the conglomerate technique the districts were grouped into five categories and showed dissimilar socio -economic conditions. Greater abstention greater socio -economic deterioration of the conglomerate ”;And even in "the upper stratum, the proportion of consistent voters reaches more than half of the citizens, in the lower one is just over the third". 

With respect to the education variable, the same study shows us the importance of that and confirms the viability of using it as a criterion to measure abstentionism. "With regard to schooling, it clearly highlights the highest level of electoral participation among people who have higher education, both for their greatest presence among consistent voters, and the greatest presence of people who have an occasional abstentionist experience.". For these reasons, the HDI has been chosen as an aggregation of these variables to measure the behavior of civil society in the issues of elections and abstentionism in relation to the utility obtained by the population of public policies;Since if a low HDI is presented in a region, it means, among other things, that the government has failed to apply public policies to increase that HDI which, we maintain, will lead the population to give a punishment vote, at least in part,in the form of abstentionism;as long as I see him as responsible for assuring him a decent life.