The meanings of ‘voting’ for ordinary citizens, their causes and consequences

On Election Day, citizens are usually asked to vote by placing a mark besides one party and/or candidate on a ballot paper. What meanings do citizens attribute to that mark? Frequently it is assumed that citizens share the view that the mark is substantively meaningful. Yet high rates of abstention, rejection of politics as usual, distrust in election administration and integrity, and democratic backsliding now challenge this assumption. This project aims not only to provide first-time evidence on what ‘voting’ means for ordinary citizens, but also to examine variation in such meanings between individuals and across types of democracies; study how elections create and modify these meanings; and investigate their attitudinal and behavioural consequences. ‘Meaning’, in this project, refers to both the significance of voting for citizens as well as what is meant by voting for citizens, which may encompass citizen definitions or understandings of voting and/or the motivations they have for voting or not. Looking at what voting means for citizens in a variety of countries promises to provide a ground-breaking understanding of citizen-conceptualizations of representation and the psychology of voting that can challenge conventional wisdom about participation and voting as well as lead to practical implications for how elections are run and administered. In addition, the project agenda will result in an observatory devised for systematic data collection on the meanings of elections on Election Day. In the long run, this will provide a resource containing information about the political meanings given to elections by citizens themselves and can be used as a basis to refine and challenge the constructed interpretations commonly assigned to elections by the media and politicians. Citizen views are gathered via a novel approach based on a citizen-science website and inductive reasoning combined with panel data, vignette experiments and topic modelling to test causal mechanisms.