While much is known about what drives people to vote, a citizen-perspective on voting is often missing. Against a backdrop of declining turnouts and democratic backsliding, this paper aims to illuminate what people dislike about voting – and what such anti-voting meanings relate to.

Using answers of 23,828 citizens from 12 highly diverse countries, this paper uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the question “what does ‘voting’ mean to you?” The initial aim is to create a citizen-perspective classification of anti-voting meanings. These may include both existing interpretations of voting (lack of political efficacy, political disillusionment, lack of political interest, costs of voting) as well as novel perspectives inductively gathered from citizens’ own words. In a second step, these meanings are quantitatively related to institutional and individual factors within our unique dataset.

To achieve this ambitious project, any answer that is negative about the act of voting is manually coded by several coders. Subsequently, these answers (N = 1775) are inductively analyzed through a grounded theory approach to investigate what citizens dislike about voting – creating a novel classification of anti-voting meanings. A final round of quantitative coding of this novel classification enables the quantitative analysis in relation to other variables in the dataset, such as societal position, level of democracy of the country or political preferences.

While there are no results of this study yet, data collection is completed, and data analysis has already commenced.