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A big voter turnout tells how many voted in an election. It may not answer the ‘why’
Commentators often read large turnouts as verdicts on incumbents. Studies from around the world have found mixed results.
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Four national elections held between October 25 and November 3, 2026, drew large numbers of voters, though political scientists who study turnout have long found that a high figure, on its own, may not be a guide to why people voted.
In Brazil, where voting is compulsory for most adults, 80.78% of registered voters cast a ballot in the October 25 presidential runoff, according to electoral court figures compiled by IFES, a Washington-based election-assistance organisation. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the incumbent president, won a fourth term over Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
In Serbia, 4.44 million of the 6.45 million registered voters, or 68.89%, turned out for the October 25 parliamentary election, according to the country's Republic Electoral Commission. The Student List, a student-led movement, won 140 of the 250 seats.
In Israel, nearly 78% of registered voters took part in the October 27 election, according to IFES figures, reported as the highest turnout since 1999. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc won 53 of the Knesset's 120 seats and the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot won 48. Neither reached the 61 needed for a majority.
In the US midterm elections on November 3, Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress. More than 51 million Americans had voted before polling day, and in Minnesota, more than 64% of eligible voters cast ballots. A national figure is not known but several outlets reported high turnouts.
Political commentators often read a surge in turnout as a verdict on the government. Some studies support that reading, while others, including one on Indian state elections, find no consistent link either way. Others study how protest movements bring new voters to the polls.
Why more people vote in some elections
In a 2016 review of 185 turnout studies in the journal Electoral Studies, João Cancela of Nova University of Lisbon and Benny Geys of the Norwegian Business School found that the rules of voting were among the most consistent influences on turnout. Easier registration was linked to higher turnout in 91% of the studies that tested it, and compulsory voting in 86%.
Countries also differ in how they calculate turnout, which can affect the headline number. Brazil, Serbia and Israel divide votes cast by the number of people on the electoral roll. In the US, where most states require citizens to register before they can vote, Minnesota and independent trackers such as the University of Florida's Election Lab divide it by everyone eligible to vote, a larger pool that includes people who never registered. Measured the American way, the same number of voters gives a lower percentage.
Close contests and campaign money bring voters out as well. In the Cancela and Geys review, close contests were linked to higher turnout in 69% of studies and heavier campaign spending in 83%, with both counting for more in national elections than in the local ones.
In a 1998 experiment in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green randomly assigned about 30,000 registered voters to be urged to vote in different ways, from a knock on the door to a phone call. Door-to-door canvassing raised turnout substantially and mail only slightly. Phone calls made no difference, they reported in the American Political Science Review in 2000.
A University of Michigan team led by political scientist Nicholas Valentino found that anger moved Americans to take part in politics more than anxiety or enthusiasm did, in a 2011 study in the Journal of Politics that drew on an experiment and decades of US election surveys.
Also read: Democrats’ midterm victory may not help US allies much
Three ways to read a high turnout
A vote against the government:
Many commentators treat a surge as a sign that voters want change. "Conventional wisdom holds that an increase in voter turnout hurts incumbents in Indian elections," Milan Vaishnav, who directs the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, and Johnathan Guy, then of the University of Chicago, wrote in 2018.
Researchers in the US found some support for that view. Thomas Hansford of the University of California, Merced, and Brad Gomez of Florida State University studied US presidential elections from 1948 to 2000, county by county, in a 2010 paper in the American Political Science Review. Rain on polling day stopped some voters going out for reasons unrelated to politics, and the two used rainfall to separate the effect of turnout from everything else going on in an election. They found that higher turnout cut the vote share of the party holding the White House and, separately, helped Democrats. It also made results harder to predict. The paper concluded that changes in turnout significantly affect vote shares, “although election-specific factors other than turnout have the greatest influence on who wins an election”.
As turnout rises, occasional voters, whose choices are more volatile, make up a larger share of the electorate, according to studies reviewed by Vaishnav and Guy.
Neither for nor against the government:
Vaishnav and Guy tested that belief in the context of India’s state polls. They examined 128 elections in India's 18 major states between 1980 and 2012. Governments won re-election in just over a third of those contests. The researchers ultimately found no reliable link between a rise in turnout and whether a government returned to power, or how many votes and seats it won. The exception was elections called before a full term ended, where higher turnout went with a smaller vote share for the government, though the authors noted the link held in only one of their three measures. Nor did they find that rising turnout favoured governments.
Their paper, in the journal Studies in Indian Politics, concluded: “A surge in voter turnout, our analyses show, is not necessarily pro- or anti-incumbent.” In India’ state elections up to 2012, governments have both won and lost amid rising turnout.
Mobilisation by a movement
Researchers have also studied what happens to voting after people take to the streets. Two of these studies used the weather, comparing areas where rain thinned a protest with areas where it did not.
A team of economists led by Andreas Madestam studied the rallies held by the US Tea Party, a conservative movement against taxes and government spending, on April 15, 2009. Where good weather brought bigger crowds, the movement grew stronger locally and the Republican vote rose in the 2010 midterm elections, they reported in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2013.
Political scientist Omar Wasow found that nonviolent Black-led civil rights protests between 1960 and 1972 raised the Democratic share of the presidential vote in nearby counties by 1.6% to 2.5%. Violent protests in 1968 likely shifted the white vote towards Republicans by 1.5% to 7.9%, he reported in the American Political Science Review in 2020.
Researchers studying more recent protests have found similar effects. Francisca Castro and Renata Retamal, a researcher at the elections body International IDEA, found that towns in Chile and Bolivia that saw protests in 2019 recorded higher turnout in the following year's votes than towns without protests, and a lower vote for the governing party, in a 2024 study in Electoral Studies. In Chile, those votes included a referendum on a new constitution. They linked the rise to a stronger sense among residents that their participation counted.
In Hong Kong, districts with more intense protests in 2019 recorded higher turnout in that year's District Council election and a swing to pro-democracy candidates, Syracuse University economist Shuo Zhang reported in 2026.
A 2022 study in the journal Public Choice, however, found "little evidence" that local Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 raised voter registration across 32 US states.
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Who votes may matter as much as how many
Australia's move to compulsory voting raised turnout by 24 percentage points and lifted the Labor Party's vote and seat shares by 7 to 10 points, Anthony Fowler, then at Harvard, found in a 2013 study. Before the change, wealthier Australians had voted more than working-class ones.
India has seen a change too. Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi, then at the Indian School of Business, found that the number of women voting for every 1,000 men in state elections held between 1962 and 2012 rose from 715 in the 1960s to 883 in the 2000s, while men’s turnout barely moved. Over the same period the ratio of women to men on the electoral rolls changed little, and the authors attributed the rise in women casting ballots to self-empowerment.
What the number may not tell
Different groups go to the polls for different reasons. Political scientists Amit Ahuja and Pradeep Chhibber found that poorer Indians describe voting as their right, while better-off voters more often cite what voting can get them, or civic duty, in a study built on focus groups and interviews in three states.
Taken together, these studies suggest that turnout can rise for several reasons at once, and that its effect on the result depends on who turned up. A single headline figure counts all these groups together and may not separate one from another.
