Structure versus Culture: A Comparative Study of the Influence of Political Institutions and Cultural Modernization Factors on Voter Turnout in Swiss Sub-national Parliamentary Elections

How can the differing levels of voter participation in sub-national parliamentary elections be explained? To answer this question I start from the current literature on cross-national comparative research, and apply explanatory approaches from this literature to the analysis of electoral turnout in sub-national units. I focus on two competing influential assessments in the literature, institutionalism and cultural modernization. The first assumes that formal political institutions generate important incentives and habits that are capable of shaping and constraining voting behavior. In contrast, a cultural modernization approach predicts that cross-sectional differences in turnout are determined by cultural habits arising from the socialization process and societal modernization. The systematic examination of electoral democracy in the Swiss cantons shows that the differing rates of electoral participation in these sub-national units are primarily attributable to the strength of political Catholicism. In this vein, rather than differences in turnout being a function of institutional and electoral procedures, they reflect cultural norms in the Swiss cantons. Moreover, the findings suggest that cultural conditions may be more significant for electoral behavior on a sub-national than on an international level.