You told me you are a would-be electoral analyst. Then, where's your version of the road map fellow traveler? For a nation with a voting experience that could be counted by fingers on one hand, ye budding electoral analysts may have to burn a good deal of midnight oil to try to start at a galloping pace. Too bad!
Now, you may want to start with something modest. How about voter turnout?
How large was the number of eligible voters that actually come out to vote, the voter turnout, usually shown as a percentage, may indicate the level of health of a democracy. This must have been mostly correct when all democracies were young and starting to take root all over the world. But has the democracy turn sour for some bulwarks of democracy of our world?
The editorial on November 11 of 2014 of International New York Times claimed "The Worst Voter Turnout in 78 Years" for U.S.
The abysmally low turnout in last week’s midterm elections — the lowest in more than seven decades — was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy. In 43 states, less than half the eligible population bothered to vote, and no state broke 60 percent.
In the three largest states — California, Texas and New York — less than a third of the eligible population voted. New York’s turnout was a shameful 28.8 percent, the fourth-lowest in the country, despite three statewide races (including the governor) and 27 House races.
Over all, the national turnout was 36.3 percent; only the 1942 federal election had a lower participation rate at 33.9 percent.
Surprising! How could that be, you may wonder. And there are lessons to be taken to heart, especially for a fledging democracy.
... The reasons are apathy, anger and frustration at the relentlessly negative tone of the campaigns.
To me that sounds like a confirmation that voters are no fools! Some of us may be uneducated or lack self-confidence or lack the lingo to argue, but we are no fools.
Republicans ran a single-theme campaign of pure opposition to President Obama, and Democrats were too afraid of the backlash to put forward plans to revive the economy or to point out significant achievements of the last six years. Neither party gave voters an affirmative reason to show up at the polls.
Here, we don't have enough information to say if affirmative reasons are lacking or if our people, at least a sizable portion of them, are disinterested or downright ignorant. Nevertheless, we need not be overly worried whether we are going to be the last in the turnout race in the ASEAN as the following graph shows:
Yet we'll need to get twenty percent or more of our eligible people to vote in order to be in the league of the highest voter turnout achievers in our region.
For this graph I have summed up all the counts of votes for all parliamentary elections reported and divided it by the sum of reported registered voters to get the average vt. Similarly for average vapt. In between, care is needed in interpreting the International IDEA data, especially with the voting age population reported. Its Code book for Voter Turnout data, 2014, explained about voting age population:
Voting age population refers to the total number of potential voters of voting age in a given country. The VAP figure is a rough estimate and it does not take into account the fact that there might be people who are above voting age but still not enfranchised due to legal or systemic barriers. The estimate gives an approximate figure of the number of eligible people but it does not reflect the exact number. VAP might differ largely from the number of registered people since registration in many countries is voluntary or not accurate.
In comparison to the ASEAN voter turnout, here's the voter turnout for selected developed countries:
In its explanation of why a voter turnout website is needed, IDEA explained that participation, whether through the institutions of civil society, political parties, or the act of voting, is always seen as an essential prerequisite of any stable democracy. Yet, it is not so simple in real life:
Beyond the widespread belief that participation in political life is a positive thing, there is little agreement on what constitutes a good or democratic level of voter turnout. Does high turnout indicate great enthusiasm for the political process or reflect compulsion, sometimes subtle, other times overt, that a government places on its citizens to vote? Does low turnout indicate a weak political system, or merely reflect a widespread contentment among the people with the system as it is? If the statistics that International IDEA has gathered indicate anything, it is that high voter turnout does not necessarily mean that a multi-party democracy is stable.
What is interesting here is that a low turnout may be reflecting a support for the current political system, or else a weak democracy! Obviously, our interpretations have to go beyond mere numbers.
Wikipedia gives considerable details on the complexities of voter turnout, its implications, and causes of low or high turnouts in its voter turnout page among which is a model for the voting decision of an individual shown below.
- P the probability that an individual's vote will affect the outcome of an election,
- B the perceived benefit that would be received if that person's favored political party or candidate were elected,
- D represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting, and
- C the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting, is
PB + D > C.
It just says that the individual will weigh his/her chance of influencing the outcome of the election together with the benefit likely to receive if the party/candidate were elected plus the perceived social/personal gratification against the cost involved to decide whether to vote or not. And practically, "Since P is virtually zero in most elections, PB is also near zero, and D is thus the most important element in motivating people to vote."
D originally stood for Democracy or civic duty. The modern understanding of D is said to have five major forms of personal gratification: (i) complying with the social obligation to vote; (ii) affirming one's allegiance to the political system; (iii) affirming a partisan preference (also known as expressive voting, or voting for a candidate to express support, not to achieve any outcome); (iv) affirming one's importance to the political system; and, (v) for those who find politics interesting and entertaining, researching and making a decision.
In analyzing voter turnout, you may have to inspect all these potential factors that may exert influence (source: Wikipedia):
Socio-economic factors. More significant in low turnout countries. A person with better education is more likely to vote. Education is considered to be the key factor in developing an individual's habit for voting. Income and class are also important. Ethnicity, race and gender may influence turnout in many nations, but considered to be not important in Western democracies today. Young people are less likely to vote than the elderly.
Hereditary factors. May be important according to some studies. But the idea is controversial.
Differences between elections. Different elections have different turnouts and the importance of an election may be the key factor in getting a higher turnout.
International differences. Tends to be lower in the United States, Asia and Latin America than most of Europe, Canada and Oceania. The differences between nations tend to be greater than those between classes, ethnic groups, or regions within nations. There are some surprising facts. Nations with better-educated populaces do not have higher turnouts. There are two main causes of these international differences—culture and institutions.
Cultural factors. Civic duty is the main factor. It takes time to develop and require such social conditions as:
- trust in government;
- degree of partisanship among the population;
- interest in politics, and
- belief in the efficacy of voting.
Institutional factors. Characteristics of any of these factors: (i) Voter registration, (ii) compulsory voting, (iii) salience, the perceived effect that an individual vote will have on how the country is run, (iv) proportionality, that is whether proportional representation or plurality system(simple plurality/first-past-the-post/single-choice voting), (v) ease of voting, and (vi) voter fatigue, could have significant effect on voter turnout.
Now that the preliminary voter list has been released for Myanmar's 2015 election, the first action you may have been thinking about is assessing its quality with your good intention of helping to improve it. I've no idea where you'll get the data, though. For me, I couldn't find any online resource for it by the Election Commission as yet. All the same I bet you've already pored over the publication Voter List Pilot Project: Findings and Recommendations by People's Alliance for Credible Elections, Myanmar, of July 2014. If there are other relevant publications, do share it. And keep up the good work friend!
