Constraints and choices: Electoral participation in historical perspective

Participation in electoral politics is not a fully voluntary act. Suffrage rules regulate who can participate, whereas institutional arrangements affect incentives to vote by shaping the consequences of the voting act. The secular increase of electoral participation in the world during the past two centuries was largely due to extensions of suffrage rather than to increased turnout of those eligible. The relation between voting and electing, as manifested in institutional arrangements, had a strong effect on individual decisions to vote. In the end, the voice of the people is inescapably structured by the ideas and the institutional frameworks that relate voting to electing.