05 July 2011

Voting in elections is stressful

Followers of this blog (and incidentally, apologies for a long gap -I've been moving house) will know of my interest in Electoral Reform. And so it won't surprise you to learn that this piqued my curiosity.
Voting in elections is stressful -- emotionally and physiologically:
A new study, conducted by scholars from the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University in Israel, has found that the level of cortisol -- a hormone released when a person is under pressure and helps the body cope with threats -- in individuals immediately prior to casting a vote was significantly higher than in the same individuals in similar non-voting conditions.

There are two things I want to say in response to this. And they're just initial thoughts; this is a 'watch this space' sort of thing. The first thing is that this was conducted in Israel. The question (perhaps naturally) is whether this would replicate in other societies, and under other electoral systems. My suspicion is that conditions in Israel might mean that the results are an unusually high stress response. And what's more is that this could be because of one or both of the fact of the kind of stakes involved in Israeli politics, and/or the very wide multi-party choice and the electoral system. Might it be less stressful to vote in France, or the USA or New Zealand, or the Czech republic or Bolivia?
So more studies in a variety of cultural settings supplemented, I think, by more qualitative studies in the perceptions of voters (and perhaps non-voters as a control?). Stress is at least partly due to the way that the stressed frame things, so examination of those frames would be important.

The other thing that could be interesting therefore, is whether there are voting systems that are less stressful for voters and whether that correlates with voter participation. I suspect that systems that involve less tactical voting may fare better, but I'm not sure whether the Israeli case tends to confirm or discount that.

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