The Relationship Between the Courts of Human Rights Decisions and Voter Turnout. An empirical analysis on Europe and Latin America

The empirical exercise conducted in this chapter is the first attempt towards an understanding of the relationship between the rulings of the Courts of Human Rights and voter turnout. Participation of voters is essential for democracy, and the judgments of the Courts of Human Rights, both in Europe and Latin America, guarantee a legal framework for free and democratic elections. Our empirical analysis, based on an original dataset including information on voter turnout for all countries under the jurisdiction of the ECHR and the IACHR and all the judgments of the two Courts, provides evidence of a positive correlation between judgments and turnout for European countries, albeit it turns negative when considering countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia and countries belonging to the former Warsaw Pact. The general conclusion is that decisions might be a sign of substantial violations of voting rights in these countries, which in turn reduces the incentive to participate for voters. On the contrary, for most Western countries, ECHR decisions might be a sign of a strong interest by voters in participation. The Latin American experience appear to be different, military dictatorships seem to matter; but the small number of judgments suggest caution when interpreting correlation results. Future research should address these issues further in order to understand what mechanisms drive the correlations we have just begun to uncover.