Deliverable 3.1 Report on voting behavior in Europe

This report examines the state of knowledge and the empirical evidence regarding electoral behavior in Europe and its connection to political trust and it has two main objectives in the context of the ActEU project. First it provides a summary of the scholarship on the trends and meaning of electoral abstention and of changes in voting choices in the context of electoral de-alignment, the emergence of new cleavages and increasing polarization, as well as their connection to political trust. Second, it provides a descriptive analysis of those trends and cross-national patterns in electoral turnout and vote choices, as well as its association with political trust. 

The report is structured around five chapters. After an introduction in Chapter 1, the report provides in Chapter 2 an overview of the state of the art on electoral turnout, voting for populist, radical and extremist parties, and the connection to political trust. Chapter 3 describes trends and cross-national patterns of turnout in a multilevel setting across Europe and examines how these are associated with patterns of trust in political actors and institutions. Chapter 4 examines cross-national and longitudinal patterns of voting choices across party families for national legislative elections and the extent to which we can observe a shift in the link between those electoral choices and levels of political trust. Chapter 5 summarizes the key findings and contributions to our state of knowledge and offers policy-relevant recommendations when appropriate.