In recent months, major protests erupted in several cities in the United States against systemic racism and police brutality. The costs of participating in these protests were high because of the heavy-handed security response and the risk of exposure to COVID-19. In a similar vein, a primary election in Georgia in June 2020 saw a record high turnout despite a series of logistical problems that created additional hurdles for countless voters. The decision to participate in these events is hard to reconcile with mainstream rational choice models of political participation.
In this timely and important book, Erdem Aytaç and Susan Stokes produce a compelling new theory of political participation that can shed light on these recent events and many other well-known paradoxes of political participation. Its central theoretical argument is that abstaining from an election or deciding not to participate in a protest can be costly for those who care about the outcome of the election (or protest). Although citizens still care about the costs of participation in the theoretical model proposed by Aytaç and Stokes, these costs are counterbalanced by the costs of abstention.
In a clear departure from rational choice theories of political participation, Aytaç and Stokes argue that the costs of abstention are mainly intrinsic or psychological. An important contribution of this book is its recognition of the role of emotions in shaping political involvement. Drawing from findings in political psychology, Aytaç and Stokes theorize that emotions such as enthusiasm or anger are mobilizing because they “create more dissonance at the prospect of staying away” (p. 35). In other words, abstaining can be costly and generate psychological discomfort for citizens who care about the outcome of an election (or the consequences of a protest movement).
After carefully reviewing competing perspectives from different disciplines, Aytaç and Stokes marshal an impressive array of evidence—both observational and experimental—in support of their new theory of participation in elections and protests. This evidence comes from the study of political participation in contexts such as the United States, Brazil, Turkey, and Ukraine. The empirical exercise is very ambitious. The authors seek to demonstrate several aspects of their general theory of political participation. The empirical chapters of the book show that people are more likely to participate when they perceive that a lot is at stake in an election or protest, that citizens can feel psychic discomfort when they abstain, and that certain emotions—in particular, anger—can have a positive effect on political participation.
One of the most interesting findings is presented in chapter 6, when the authors analyze the electoral participation of the unemployed. The link between unemployment and turnout has been the subject of a long-standing scholarly debate, with some studies suggesting unemployment depresses turnout and others arguing the opposite. Aytaç and Stokes revisit this question and convincingly demonstrate that unemployed people are more likely to vote when the level of unemployment is high. Opposition parties tend to blame the incumbent government for economic difficulties when unemployment is high, which generates anger among the unemployed. Anger in turn increases the psychic costs of abstaining. This finding clearly shows how this new theory of political participation can be fruitfully applied to illuminate empirical questions that have puzzled scholars for a long time.
By contrast, other findings presented in the book are more suggestive than definitive. Aytaç and Stokes rely primarily on survey experiments to test different aspects of their theoretical framework. Survey experiments have several important advantages from the perspective of causal inference, such as random assignment to treatment and the possibility of “ruling out” confounding effects, but they can have low external validity because people are asked to react to hypothetical situations. Some of the analyses presented in this book are not immune to this potential problem. For instance, in chapter 3, the authors test the costly abstention theory of turnout by asking people to imagine how they would feel in the hypothetical scenario that they could not vote in a hypothetical gubernatorial election. Although the results are in line with the theory presented in the book—that is, there is higher psychic discomfort when people contemplate abstaining in important and close elections—future research should probe the emotional effects of abstention in less “artificial” settings.
More broadly, the theory of political participation developed in the book is often richer and more fine-grained than the empirics. For example, an important insight of the theory is that repression of early protests generates both costs of participation and costs of abstention. The interplay between these two costs determines whether people who care about the outcome of the protest decide to join it. The results presented in chapter 8 simply show that reminding Turkish citizens of the violent response of the Turkish government to the 2013 Gezi protests makes them more likely to join a future demonstration. More research is necessary to fully understand when the repression of an early wave of protests leads to larger protests and when a heavy-handed security response nips protests in the bud.
The book offers a comprehensive theoretical framework that can be used to rethink many familiar findings in the turnout literature that had received ad-hoc explanations in previous research; for example, lower turnout in midterm elections in the United States and EU elections in Europe and higher turnout in transitional elections, close elections, and referendums. The argument that there are psychic costs to abstaining when people perceive that a lot is at stake is original and important. One wonders, however, why the costs of abstention are only psychological. In contexts where voting is compulsory and enforced, citizens might incur material costs—for example, financial penalties or an inability to apply to jobs in the public sector—when they stay home on Election Day. In developing democracies, brokers in clientelism networks can observe whether people vote or participate in protests. Abstaining can be costly in those settings because people can lose access to important benefits, such as food or cash. Amending the participation “equation” to incorporate these costs seems feasible and might be advisable.
The theory and the empirical analysis in this important book focus on the individual decisions that people make to participate or abstain in an election or protest. Less attention is paid to contextual factors that can shape those individual perceptions and behaviors studied in the book. In addition to the closeness of the election, institutional characteristics (presidentialism vs. parliamentarism), political conjuncture (rise of an outsider or populist candidate), or economic factors (globalization) can all shape citizens’ evaluations of how much is at stake in a particular election. The theoretical framework developed in this book gives students of political participation new tools to think about how these macrolevel factors influence individual decisions to vote and join protests.
Notwithstanding these minor quibbles with the arguments and the empirics, this book is a tour de force that should be required reading for both theorists of political participation and empirically minded scholars alike. Aytaç and Stokes offer a clear multidisciplinary synthesis of previous research, as well as a new unified and compelling theory of political participation that helps us make better sense of well-known paradoxes of political participation. This book will undoubtedly become a classic in the political participation literature.
