Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. By Mark N. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

According to Mark Franklin, “As the vexing questions of political science can be regarded as puzzles, the particular topic of voter turnout could be called the ‘grand enchilada’ of puzzles of political science…. [A]lmost everything about voter turnout is puzzling, from the question of why anyone bothers to vote at all to the question of why certain variables appear to explain voter turnout in some circumstances but not in others.” He makes this bold but true statement in the preface (p. xi) of his comparative study of turnout in more than 20 established democracies since World War II. Voter turnout is one of the more frequently studied topics in political science, but the results of all these scholarly efforts remain rather poor and unsatisfactory. We still know distressingly little about why some people vote and others do not, why turnout is much higher in some countries than in others, and why in so many countries there seems to be a steady and irrevocable decline in turnout in national elections.