Abstention: what electoral silence may mean

A person may abstain because no offer suits them, because all suit them roughly equally, because they judge the result already settled, because the ballot seems to them without effect on their life, or for entirely material reasons of availability, travel or registration.

These situations do not have the same political meaning. The first two belong to the offer, the third to the electoral system, the fourth to the relation to public action, the last to the practical organisation of voting. The same abstention rate may therefore describe very different states of opinion.

To this is added a useful distinction: constant abstention and intermittent abstention. The first concerns people lastingly distant from voting, the second voters who sometimes vote and sometimes do not. The two are not remedied in the same way, and conflating them distorts any analysis.

One may observe that abstention is not spread uniformly by age, level of qualification or employment situation, and that these gaps are documented convergently in many countries. One may also observe that it varies strongly by type of election, which indicates that it depends in part on the perceived stakes and not only on the disposition of individuals.

One cannot deduce an opinion from it. Interpreting abstention as a rebuke, as tacit approval or as indifference belongs to commentary, not to measurement. It is one of the few things one can say with certainty that an absent ballot does not tell us.

Surveys that question abstainers after the election contribute elements, but with a caveat: the motive declared after the fact is reconstructed, often more flattering or more political than the real reason on the day itself.

Practical arrangements weigh more than one imagines: ease of registration, day of the poll, the possibility of voting remotely or by proxy, distance to the polling station. International comparisons show that these details shift turnout by several points, independently of any political enthusiasm.

That is methodologically good news and rhetorically bad news: part of what is interpreted as a political message belongs to organisation. Before concluding to disinterest, one must look at how much effort the system demands in order to vote.

The blank vote consists in going to the polling station and casting an empty ballot: it is an act of participation that expresses a refusal of the offer. Since 2014, in France, it is counted separately and mentioned in the results, without entering into the calculation of votes cast.

This distinction matters for interpretation. The blank vote is the only act that says at once “I am taking part” and “none of these options”, where abstention does not allow the two messages to be separated.

Many people who do not vote have perfectly structured positions on the big questions, and many people who vote regularly have unstable positions. The electoral act and the content of convictions are two distinct things, which cannot be deduced from each other.

That is a reason to measure positions independently of voting behaviour. A profile describes what you think, not what you do on polling day, and the gap between the two is itself interesting information for anyone who wants to understand themselves.