Turnout in the 2014 European Parliament election in Germany has increased to 48.1 percent from 43.3 percent in 2009. Some political observers have offered as an explanation that the 4.9 percentage points increase in turnout is due to an unusually high number of local elections and referendums conducted in parallel to the EP election on May 25th 2014. In total, local elections were held in 11 out of 16 German states (Länder). In this blog post, I provide evidence that the fact that the European elections and local elections took place in parallel increased the turnout rate for the European election. My evidence is based on official election returns and demographic/socioeconomic data.
By Arndt Leininger
Turnout in the 2014 EP election in Germany varied greatly from state to state, and from region to region (see Fig. 1 and 2). It is striking that nearly all states that saw local elections also saw higher turnout in EP elections than other states. Note that Berlin, which has the highest turnout of all states that did not hold local elections, held a statewide referendum on the day of the EP elections. It is important to note that the subsequent analyses were conducted in considering that no simultaneous local elections were held in Berlin. The results presented hereafter can thus be considered as conservative estimates of the effect of simultaneous elections on turnout in European elections.
A simple comparison of turnout rates between states with and without local elections reveals a statistically significant difference of 5.8 percentage points: 49.6 percent on average for states with simultaneous local elections (excluding the state of Lower Saxony, where local elections were only held in a few entities) and 43.8 for states without them. When I use more fine-grained disaggregated data, i.e. at the sub-state “regional” level (Kreise and kreisefreie Städte), I find an even more striking difference of 8.9 percentage points (50.9 percent vs. 41.9 percent).
Of course, the difference in turnout could also be due to other factors that happen to coincide with local elections. However, it is unlikely that any macro level determinant of the vote correlates with the timing of regional elections. Nevertheless, to corroborate the influence of local elections, I estimate a more complex statistical model – a random intercept regression model for the statistically inclined – including a number of variables capturing determinants of turnout identified in the political science literature. These are population density, the proportion of people receiving unemployment benefits, local business tax revenues as a proxy for wealth of a region, and the proportion of high school graduates in the region in the model. The estimated effect of local elections remains relatively unaffected by the inclusion of these controls: The turnout rate at the European elections is 3.2 percentage points higher in regions where simultaneous local elections were held.
I also take advantage of the fact that only 17 of 46 regions in Lower Saxony held local elections. Estimating a similar model on regions in Lower Saxony only indicates an effect of local elections on EP election turnout of about 2.6 percentage points. These results provide evidence that the effect found in the national sample is not due to unobservable differences between states but does indeed reflect a causal effect of local election on EP election turnout.
What would turnout have been without local elections?
Based on these estimations, it is easy to calculate what would have been the turnout rate at the European election if the local elections would not have taken place the very same day. To do so, I subtract the average effect of 3.2 percentage points from all regional turnout rates. Then, based on actual population figures, I calculate what would be the number of voters under this scenario. The results (see Fig. 2): 46 percent of Germans (instead of the actual 48.1 percent) would have shown up at the polling stations if there hadn’t been local elections on the very same day.
Figure 2
Did turnout increase from 2009 to 2014 because of local elections?
Still, knowing that local elections increased turnout in EP elections does not necessarily mean that local elections are a source of the increase in turnout in EP elections from 2009 to 2014. One should note that only three states, Brandenburg, Hamburg, and North Rhine Westphalia, that held local elections in 2014 did not hold elections on EP election day in 2009.
A better test of this causal statement is to check whether the effect of parallel local and European elections remains after controlling for the turnout rate at the previous European election in 2009. However, even when I add this extra variable in the regression presented above, this effect remains largely unchanged. What is more, in the three German states (Brandenburg, Hamburg, and North Rhine Westphalia) where simultaneous local elections were held in 2014, but not in 2009, the results demonstrate that the turnout rate increased by 10 percentage points (see Fig. 1). It did also increase substantially in Berlin where a state wide referendum took place.
A quick analysis of the preliminary regional election results suggests that regions that held local elections in parallel to the EP elections would have seen about 3 percentage points less in turnout, had they not held local elections. The national turnout rate would have been around two percentage points lower. Considering the work of a colleague in Mannheim, who demonstrates that the Eurosceptic party AfD seems to have benefitted from low turnout, this is a highly relevant political issue.
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Arndt Leininger is a PhD student at the Hertie School of Governance. His thesis topic is Direct Democracy and Representative Government.
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