A groundbreaking new book, The Meanings of Voting for Citizens - A Scientific Challenge, a Portrait, and Implications, takes readers on a global journey to uncover how people across 13 countries in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania conceptualize the act of voting. This ambitious study draws on nearly a million words from over 25,000 individuals, collected through open-ended surveys and analysed using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

The authors Carolina Plescia, M. Belén Abdala, Ming M. Boyer, Anna Lia Brunetti, Sylvia Kritzinger, Petro Tolochko, Markus Wagner, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, André Blais and Cal Le Gall, employ an innovative approach that combines conceptual, theoretical, and empirical insights to explore what voting means to citizens and how these meanings influence political engagement. Their findings challenge the assumption of universal views on democracy, revealing striking variations in how individuals perceive voting, both within liberal democracies and electoral autocracies.

The publication appears in the Comparative Politics, a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics.

To make it widely accessible, it is being published as an open access title under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Readers can access the book for free on Oxford Scholarship Online.

Carolina Plescia presented the book in the framework of a course at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev thought by Prof. Jennifer Oser. You can watch the webinar recording here.