ABSTRACT
In the first instance, because of their extensive history with democracy and competitive elections, this question has attracted considerable attention from scholars of older democracies in Western Europe and North America. Regardless of these limitations, it is important to ask what implications the assessment of electoral participation in newly consolidated democracies carries for the overall understanding of political behaviour more generally. However, an alternative for future research would be focus more on the Columbia school’s approach, which is based on the view that politics and more specifically people’s decision of whether to or vote can be better understood as a social phenomenon. In relying on the Michigan school, our explanation for people’s decision of whether to vote has been determined by the degree to which voters possess different characteristics and resources such as age, gender, different kinds of socioeconomic resources such as education, income, occupational status, as well as cultural attitudinal factors such as political interest, efficacy, political trust.
