The relationship between the left and abstention according to the ‘conventional wisdom’. 

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... vast body of literature analyzes the relationship between abstention and the left share of the vote. Whereas it is commonly thought that abstention harms the electoral results of left-leaning parties (De Nardo, 1980; Hansford and Gomez, 2010; Lijphart, 1997), other findings have found this claim controversial and difficult to sustain (Fisher, 2007; Pacek and Radcliff, 1995). Departing from this debate, I move beyond previous studies of abstention on the left and distinguish among abstentions on the left, the centre and the right. By reconsidering the traditional approach to study the ideological bias, this paper demonstrates that centrist abstention is higher than commonly assumed and, in fact, generally higher than abstention on the other ideological positions. Why do we observe variation in ideological abstention patterns? I argue that it is theoretically reasonable to expect that some factors may lead some ideological positions to abstain more than others. To explore this, I distinguish among three ideological blocks and calculate abstention for each in order to identify whether all appear to be influenced by the same factors. This article explores how partisan or institutional characteristics explain ideological abstention differences across contexts, as well as the traditional socio-economic interpretation. To test the different hypothesis I apply a different methodological strategy and analyze variation on ideological abstention patterns with a new dataset that compiles aggregate measures from different national or cross-national studies for 27 European countries between 1964 and 2013. This approach allows better identification of the percentage of abstainers in each ideological block (the left, the centre and the right). The findings here show that the role of parties influences ideological abstention patterns, especially in the centre position. Most importantly, I find that convergence towards the centre leads to higher centrist abstention and, conversely, polarization increases centrist participation. Finally, some factors have a heterogeneous impact on ideological bias of abstention: while leftist abstention appears to be more affected by socio-structural factors, centrist variation of turnout patterns appears to be a function of party configurations. Studies of political participation and representation often contend that politicians respond more to the preferences of voters than to those of abstainers. If participation is not homogeneously distributed across social groups, the represen- tativeness of the electoral bodies falls short of democracy’s ideal (Verba, 1987). The common claim that ‘‘unequal participation spells unequal influence’’ raises significant questions about political equality and institutional representation (Lijphart, 1997). Furthermore, unequal participation can also have substantial political consequences if unequal turnout benefits some political parties. When the supporters of a party are more likely to go to the polls, this party needs to invest fewer resources in mobilization strategies. Therefore, it is argued that in cases of unusually high participation, or if turnout drops from one election to the other, some parties could reap the rewards (Grofman et al., 1999; Lijphart, 1997). One of the most studied biases in the literature is the ideological bias. Over recent decades, scholars and pundits have perpetuated the claim that unlikely voters going to the polls are generally leftist. The relationship between turnout and the left has been considered to be negative: leftist ideology is correlated with a smaller likelihood of voting. Conversely, this literature argues that the more representative voters are of the general population, the better leftist parties will perform (Aguilar and Pacek, 2000; Finseraas, 2014; Hansford and Gomez, 2010; Lijphart, 1997; McAllister and Mughan, 1986). In fact, this relationship is based on several propositions (O’Malley, 2008). Firstly, citizens of lower socioeconomic status are less likely to participate in elections. Secondly, at the same time, these citizens tend to be ideologically leftist and thus are more likely to vote for leftist parties. Thirdly, as a result, this group’s lower turnout provides a relative electoral advantage to right-wing parties, at the cost of left-wing parties. Therefore, socio-economic status (SES) creates a bias on turnout that only affects the left-wing parties because SES will tend to positively covary with the left (see Figure 1). Despite the links among these concepts, they have so far been analyzed separately. The first approach focuses on the first part of the causal chain, that is, whether lower SES individuals are less likely to participate in elections (Aguilar and Pacek, 2000; Campbell, 1960; Gallego, 2010; Ham and Smets, 2013). Stemming from the resource model (Verba, 1987), all conclude that low participation is indeed correlated with low socio-economic characteristics. However, these works are not able to link this rather strong relationship with leftist voting patterns. In other words, these findings do not automatically mean that citizens of lower SES, had they participated in the elections, would have voted for left-wing parties (Pettersen and Rose, 2007). To sustain this crucial causal chain, the idea is that higher abstention among lower SES voters would only damage the overall electoral fortunes of the left if and only if lower SES citizens are more likely to be ideologically leftist. In other words, at the aggregate level it is consequentially logical to expect higher abstention rates among leftist individuals in those countries where the relationship between lower SES citizens and the left is stronger. However, this idea is not free from controversy. Some analyses demonstrate that the linkage between lower SES citizens and the left has substantially declined (Gray and Caul, 2000). Lower SES citizens sometimes support right-wing parties or have deviated from their traditional leftist option (Zhirkov, 2014). Overall, due to some factors such as postmaterialism or ideological convergence of parties, the leftist vote towards a leftist party is less based on the class-voting argument (Evans and Tilley, 2012; Jansen et al., 2013; Zhirkov, 2014). The second approach in the literature, generally aggregate, focuses on the left and abstention. Scholars examine whether turnout is correlated with leftist electoral fortunes. These studies include work with a cross-national perspective, (Aguiler and Pacek, 2000; Pacek and Radcliff, 1995), work focused on the US (Hansford and Gomez, 2010; Martinez and Gill, 2005) and work focused on the United Kingdom (McAllister and Mughan, 1986). Overall, they conclude that higher levels of turnout would have led to better results for left-wing parties. However, other scholars find that high turnout does not automatically lead to better results for the left (DeNardo, 1980; Fisher, 2007; Grofman et al., 1999). Since prior studies focus on voting for the left and abstention and fail to examine the entire ideological spectrum, it has not been identified whether factors leading to the creation of an ideological bias homogeneously affect all ideological positions. Theoretically, it is reasonable to expect that a particular factor could affect one ideology, but not all of them. Thus, as men- tioned previously, and following the conventional wisdom, leftist ideological bias should be higher in those contexts where the connection between lower SES individuals and the left is stronger. On a similar reasoning, a possible explanation for understanding the new ideological bias (centrist abstention) can go in the same direction: centrist abstention is expected to be higher where individuals of lower SES are over-represented in the centre. 1 In addition, the socio-structural view offers another explanation: party identification. Being identified with a party is related to higher levels of participation (Geys, 2006), while those without political party attachment are less likely to vote (Aguilar and Pacek, 2000). The erosion of party attachments has affected all voters, but this has been unequally distributed across ideological positions. Data collected in this article shows that, on average, the percentage of non-partisan identifiers are higher on the centre (48.4 % ) than on the left (31.3 % ) or the right (33.2 % ). Hence, The blurring of the social-class connection and the erosion of party identification has other important implications. Both factors have increased the impact of party strategies on the likelihood of participating (Aarts and Wessels, 2005; Evans and Tilley, 2012). Overall, one might expect an increasing relevance of the political context as this will be of great significance for the calculus in deciding whether they would vote and, if so, for which party (Franklin, 2004). Besides the socio-structural explanation, the roles of parties can account for variation on leftist/centrist/rightist abstention levels. The decision to participate or abstain depends upon what parties do, and different party scenarios push or depress abstention levels, with some more influential than others (for review, see Blais, 2006). Here, I highlight only those factors that affect different ideological positions differently, thus producing ideological bias. Departing from the theoretical expectations raised by prior work, I explore whether some factors create heterogeneous effects and therefore help explain the variation on leftist/centrist/ rightist abstention levels. I focus on the ideological choices offered by parties (polarization) and the number of ...