Voting is a democratic method of making important decisions in groups. Voting comes in two main forms: in the first type, voters decide on concrete issues, which is called direct democracy, and in the modern political system comes in the form of referendums. Another type of voting is concerned with electing one or more individuals to serve in some formal function, with the reasoning that the elected official would make decisions according to the will of the voters. This type of voting exists in a representative democracy. While most of the attention of experts and the public is concerned with voting for members of local and national political representatives, voting as a system of making decisions is also used in businesses, civic organizations, religious organizations, various types of contests, etc. This entry will focus on voting for representative elected offices and referendums.

                  Who is Allowed to Vote – Voting Restrictions

Voting, during most times that existed, from the Greek city-states up to the 20th century, was restricted only to property-owning males, which led to only a small proportion of people who lived in those countries being allowed to vote. One of the strictest restrictions on voting rights was, and even today is, related to citizenship, as only those who are officially designated as citizens have the right to vote. Even today absolute majority of countries in the world don’t allow both legal and illegal migrants and lawful residents full voting rights, with the only exceptions being New Zealand, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, and Malawi, which allow long-time permanent residents the right to vote in national elections. In the European Union, citizens of one country can vote in local elections of another member country, but not in national elections. Similar rights to vote in local elections for non-citizens exist in some other countries, too.

Today, only universal voting restrictions regards one’s age as all countries have age restrictions -the minimum age for a person to be allowed to vote. Voting age in almost all countries, before the end of the Second World War, was 21 or higher. In the decades after, most countries lowered the voting age to 18. As of 2023, only United Arab Emirates has voting age of 25, seven countries have voting age of 21, five more countries hava voting ages of 19 or 20, the most of the countries in the world have voting age of 18, in four countries voting age is 17, and in seven countries voting age is 16 (including Brazil and Argentina).    

Women’s suffrage has, for a long time, been restricted, as before the 20th century, no independent country (except the Kingdom of Hawaii during a short period of 1840-1852) guaranteed women the right to vote. Some subnational or dependent territories were the exception as they gave women the right to vote separately – US states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho; British territories of South Australia, New Zealand, and Western Australia, and the Russian autonomous state of the Grand Duchy of Finland being the most important examples. Denmark became the first independent country to guarantee women the right to vote in 1915. In the next several decades, most of the countries in Europe, North America, and South America successively gave full voting rights to women. By the year 2000, only countries that didn’t allow women to vote were Afghanistan, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, with all of them later giving women those rights.

Similar to previous restrictions, prior to the end of World War I, most countries didn’t guarantee the right to vote even to all men, as in many of them, in order to qualify to vote, individuals had to fulfill some economic qualification – possessing property or paying taxes above a certain minimal limit to qualify. Those limitations excluded the majority of the male population, as most of them were poor peasants and workers. Working class and labor unions agitated and pressured governments to expand voting rights. Greece in 1844 and France in 1848 became the first countries that enact full male suffrage, without economic restrictions. In the decade after World War I, universal male suffrage became the norm in most independent countries. Another restriction, which also affected mainly the poor, was the literacy requirement for people to be able to vote.

Prior to the end of the Second World War, most countries that had colonies or dependent territories didn’t give people living in them the right to vote in the national elections of the parent country. In the period of 1945 to 1990, most of those territories either gained independence, while some of those that didn’t become independent got the right for their inhabitants to vote in national elections of the parent country. Inhabitants of British overseas territories and Crown Dependencies have the right to vote for the parliament of those territories, but don’t have the right to vote in UK general elections. The USA also doesn’t give the citizens of their territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, US Virgin Islands) and the District of Columbia full voting rights. The right to elect members of the House of Representatives and the Senate of the US is restricted to citizens of 50 federal states, while the right to elect the president of the US, apart from citizens of 50 federal states, is only given to citizens of the District of Columbia, with the exclusion of all other territories.

Most countries don’t allow some or all individuals who are actively serving a prison sentence to participate in elections, while some, mostly European countries, allow even elections to be held in prisons. Few countries prohibit even former convicts from participating in the elections. In the US, Laws enacted in 48 states prevent individuals with prior felony convictions from voting. Due to these prohibitions, in 2022, around 4.4 million US citizens were ineligible to vote. A small number of countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, and Turkey,  prohibit active members of the military from participating in elections.       

Even in the countries where slavery and segregation based on race existed, disenfranchisement based on race was rarely explicit, as usually some other formal reason was used as an excuse for the exclusion of members of the oppressed race from elections. For instance, beginning in 1877 during the post-Reconstruction era in the United States, so-called Jim Crow laws imposed restrictive measures such as literacy tests and poll taxes. These requirements were often waived for poor or uneducated white citizens but were used to systematically disenfranchise Black Americans until they were invalidated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Additionally, laws barring convicted individuals—and in some cases former convicts—from voting in many U.S. states continued to disproportionately impact African Americans.

While in some countries, such as in the United States, citizens must register to vote before an election to be eligible to vote, in many countries all adult citizens are automatically, when they reach voting age or gain citizenship status, automatically become registrated to vote. On the other hand, there are around 20 countries that have compulsory voting, and those who don’t vote usually have to pay a fine. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, and Singapore are some of the countries that have compulsory voting laws that are actually enforced regularly.  

Information regarding undue influences on voting and various voting systems is part of the entry Democracy.  

     Relationship Between Voting and Democracy

Supporters of democracy claim that, because elected officials in democracies are accountable to voters, they are more likely to pursue policies that benefit broad segments of society rather than serving narrow personal interests. This includes providing public goods such as infrastructure, public safety, and education, as well as upholding the rule of law instead of making arbitrary decisions about access to government resources. However, since an individual vote appears insignificant among millions, voting presents a classic collective action problem: while collective participation produces shared benefits, any single person’s contribution seems negligible, reducing the incentive to participate. One way to address this challenge is by fostering a sense of civic duty, encouraging citizens to view voting as a meaningful responsibility within their community.

Voter turnout varies widely across countries and over time, partly because governments, political parties, and candidates use different methods to encourage participation and partly due to differences in political culture. The United States, for instance, experienced lower voter turnout throughout much of the twentieth century compared to other wealthy democracies, a pattern that continued into the twenty-first century. In contrast, many Western European countries saw turnout decline after the 1970s, while U.S. turnout among eligible voters remained relatively stable during that period. Very low turnout can undermine the legitimacy of elections, as voters may not accurately reflect the broader population. Because individuals with lower income and education levels are less likely to vote, low participation tends to disadvantage parties that rely on their support. To counteract this, some countries have implemented compulsory voting, imposing fines on citizens who fail to vote. Additionally, some scholars suggest that frequent elections or ballots with many races can lead to voter apathy, a phenomenon often described as “election fatigue.”

                                      Voting Patterns  

Individual voters often base their voting pattern on some collective identity, such as profession, economic class, region, religion, gender, race, or ethnicity. In other instances, voting is based on the values instilled by parents or long-time party identification. Scholarly research placed the most attention on the relationship between class membership and voting patterns. Robert Alford, in his „Class Voting in Anglo-American Political Systems” (1967), introduces the Alford index, which measures the difference between the percentage of manual workers voting for left-wing parties, on the one hand, and the percentage of nonmanual workers voting for other parties. Class-based voting became more pronounced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US and Europe. Class voting remained important until the end of the twentieth century, when other types of collective identities, such as race, educational level, and gender, became equally or even more important. The first explanation for this shift argues that postmodern values influenced some voters to become more focused on non-economic issues. The second explanation concerns changes in the relative sizes of classes, and the shrinking of the manual working class led to changes in the strategy of leftist parties as they became ‘‘catch-all’’ parties.  

Even more complex political realignments have happened in the US in the last century. During the years of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt ran to become the President of the USA and won with his “New Deal coalition” composed of working-class and minority voters from the north and well-educated southern white voters. By the 1960s, the Democratic New Deal coalition began to unravel due to disagreements over issues such as civil rights for African Americans, the Vietnam War, environmental and consumer protections, religious and family values, gun control, and approaches to crime. Before this period, both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States functioned largely as broad, inclusive coalitions that encompassed a wide range of ideological viewpoints. However, the political realignment that started in the 1960s transformed the Republican Party into a distinctly conservative party, advocating reduced government regulation, increased military spending, the use of capital punishment for violent offenses, opposition to restrictions on gun ownership, and the promotion of traditional cultural values, including school prayer and resistance to same-sex marriage.

During the decades following the 1950s, pronounced racial and religious voting patterns also developed, with African Americans and Jewish Americans overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic Party, while the most religious white voters tended to align strongly with Republicans. Additionally, a gender gap emerged in the 1980s and persisted into the twenty-first century, with women favoring the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1980.

                      Theoretical Research on Voting

In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), John Stuart Mill contends that everybody has to have the right to vote, to ensure that their interests are protected and represented. But, on the other hand, he was opposed to secret voting, because public voting would prevent selfish behavior and necessitate voters to justify their choices based on reason and social utility. Mill also advocated for plural voting for educated and professional individuals, and the implementation of education tests as a condition for the right to vote. He argued that new legislation should be created by commissions of experts, and not by elected representatives. Mill distinguished between True democracy and False democracy. In a True democracy, voters are encouraged to use reason in making political decisions but are prevented from making unreasonable decisions. The ultimate goal of the government is to help individuals develop their own path to happiness, although everyone is responsible for creating that path and achieving happiness.     

Joseph Schumpeter, in the part of his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), which deals with democracy, discusses the classical theories of democracy and develops a critique of such views. He believes that the core of classical theories of democracy is that democracy is an institutional system in which citizens elect representatives who will pursue general interests in elections. In this view of democracy, politicians do not fight for their own interests but only serve as intermediaries between the will of the citizens and the realization of their needs. Schumpeter believes that traditional theories of democracy are wrong, so he introduces his theory of democracy, according to which democracy is an institutional system in which politicians fight for power by fighting for the votes of citizens in elections. He also criticizes the classical view of democracy in which voters are rational and able to understand the general interests of society, and, in addition, he disputes the existence of some idealized concept of the common good. Modern societies are complex and differentiated; different groups have different interests around which they fight, so the common good can't exist in those societies. Different groups, in modern democratic societies, are fighting for power and votes, and at the same time, they are carrying out political propaganda to which ordinary citizens are very susceptible. Topics and solutions that are the subject of political controversy were imposed on voters by politicians and not the other way around. In that sense, the popular sovereignty and rationality of the voters are a complete illusion. There is great political inequality between ordinary citizens and those with political and economic power - capitalists and corporations have economic power, politicians have their organizations and propaganda, unions have the power to lobby and negotiate, state bureaucracy controls the work and goals of state bodies, and the like. On the other hand, ordinary citizens have neither power nor influence, nor enough information and rationality, and the only thing they have is the right to vote. In Schumpeter's view of democracy, this system becomes only an institutionally regulated procedure for electing political leadership.

Paul Lazarsfeld studied voting in his books Personal Influence (1955), Voting (1966), and People's Choice (1968). In the book Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld present the results of their research and conclude that different people have different levels of information on political issues and that voting behavior is greatly influenced by social contacts. The ability and willingness to accept the message sent by the media are influenced by many factors: personal education and ideological commitment, as well as the emotional strength, form, and language of the message itself. Even more than radio or the press, voting behavior is influenced by "opinion leaders", people who have a great influence on people close to them, because they, in their environment, are the ones who share the most information and opinions about politics.

Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan studied political divisions in democracies in their book Party Systems and Voting Alignments (1967). They believe that political divisions have three main characteristics: divisions are the consequences of socio-cultural and socio-economic differences in a country's population; divisions create collective identities that form the basis of joint action; and differences and identities are expressed through organizations such as political parties or interest groups. As the main political divisions in European countries, they single out religious, geographical, and class divisions. These political divisions affect the formation of a specific party system in each state. The more levels of political divisions there are in a country, the more political parties there will be that will reflect those multiple divisions. The political divisions in European countries were most influenced by the following processes: the Protestant Reformation, the democratic revolutions, the industrial revolution, and the class conflicts between workers and capitalists. These two authors concluded that these processes led to the creation of major political divisions in most European countries before the First World War and that the divisions formed until then remain the most important political divisions to this day.

In the book Postmodernization (1992), Jan Pakulski, Malcolm Waters, and Stephen Crook explore the process of postmodernization. During modernization, culture went through processes of differentiation, rationalization, and commodification. In postmodernization, the processes of hypercomodification, hyperrationalization, and hyperdifferentiation take place. Thus, a "postculture" is created in which cultural styles and personal tastes are fragmented and mixed, and the distinction between high and popular culture is increasingly erased. In the sphere of politics, traditional political structures and relations were dying out, which were based on class politics and in which the state, representatives of employers, and trade unions played the most important role. Postmodern politics is characterized by increasingly significant extinctions of class identification and class voting, as well as the increasing importance of lifestyles and environmental issues in politics. The power of the state and traditional elites is weakening, while the importance and power of new social movements are growing.

Francis Fox Piven, in her books Why Americans Don't Vote (1988), Labor Parties in Post-Industrial Societies (1992), Why Americans Still Don't Vote (2000), and Keeping Down the Black Vote (2009) explores the political and economic reasons that led the poor and other disenfranchised populations not to vote, and therefore not to have adequate political representation in US Congress. Piven shows that the reason for the low turnout in the US elections is the systematic attempt of the political elite to limit the right to vote by making the registration process for voting more difficult. It is precisely such machinations that have led to the interests of the poor not being proportionally represented in government institutions. The weakening of the power of the trade union is another important factor influencing the reduction of the power of the working class. The author concludes that the poor people in the United States are largely excluded from the democratic process and that the enormous economic inequalities created by capitalism substantially limit political equality.

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