How excited do you get when you hear that the voter turnout was low?

I have to admit that I get quite excited when i hear that the turnout on some election was 20% or 30% or 50% or what have you. I also get excited when I hear that more people voted for the Big Brother tripe than vote for their MP. Its just not me, pundit after pundit has complained that the drop in voter turnout is a threat to democracy and our liberal societies at large!

But curiously enough, according to a whole set of new research which has been done, this concern is vastly over-rated.

Low electoral turnout has become common in many countries. Whether this is a
problem for a democracy depends on—among other things—whether higher turnout
would have made other parties more relevant. This introductory article discusses
the findings and approaches of previous work on this question and summarizes the
findings of the work published in this issue. The various articles, despite
using different approaches, looking at different countries and different types
of election, all show that any bias in election outcomes is typically rather
small and is not in a specific direction: sometimes the left would benefit from
higher turnout, sometimes other parties. Therefore the concerns about potential
bias consequent on low turnout are generally misplaced.

Georg Lutz and Michael Marsh, Introduction: Consequences of low turnout, Electoral Studies, Volume 26, Issue 3, September 2007, Pages 539-547.

While I am not planning to talk about all the papers, I am going to delve a bit deeper into one specific paper, which talks about Span and Terror. But for the rest, the next time somebody says that more people voted for Nigela than Anjum or Delia compared to the voting for the European Union Presidency, tell them not to worry! :)

Mind you, i am talking about bog standard liberal democracies, not the great democracies of Syria and Egypt who are in the heaven of 98-99% voter turnouts!

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!