Local Electoral Systems and Voter Participation: Evidence from Brazil and Bolivia.

How do differences in electoral systems affect voter participation at the local level? There is an established literature on what drives differences in voter turnout cross-nationally, and the consensus is that institutional factors, including variation in electoral systems, are important determinants of voter turnout in advanced democracies. There is much less consensus on what drives voter turnout in less developed democracies, and even less on how the lessons learned from legislative and presidential elections might be applied to municipal elections. In this project, we use new sub-national data from municipalities in Bolivia and Brazil to explore voter turnout in a novel way, comparing local variation from two countries with very different local electoral systems. This approach allows us to utilize variation in over 5500 municipalities to test the effect of differences in electoral systems (PR and indirectly elected mayors vs. directly elected mayors), number of political parties, income, literacy, urban-rural differences, competitiveness of the election, and a number of control variables on voter turnout. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]