Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Discovering abstentionist profiles in 2015 Catalan elections

  • Original Research
  • Published:
Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

One of the main democratic act is to elect representers for a country Government. Voters have to choose the representers of political parties that best fit their interests. However, it is also possible to abstain, i.e., to give up choosing the representers. Lastly, the percentage of abstention has increased in many democracies and, consequently, many studies have been carried out in order to discover the causes of the abstention. Causes such as alienation and indifference for politics have been found and characterized, but it is not clear who is abstaining. Some studies in specific countries have related aspects such age, education or wealth with voting. Nevertheless, all these studies are based on questionnaires that could not be completely reliable. In the present paper we use decision trees, an artificial intelligence technique, to extract patterns that characterize the profile of abstentionists. Differently from other studies, we used a data base elaborated from public data bases with both socio-economic and electoral data. In particular, we focused our study in Catalonia and the electoral results to the Catalan Parliament held in 2015. We also propose the use of decision trees to analyze the database and to extract patterns to characterize different profiles of abstentionist people.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Adams J, Dow J, Merrill S (2006) The political consequences of alienation-based and indifference-based voter abstention: applications to presidential elections. Polit Behav 28(1):65–86

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • AIS AG (2019) www.ais-int.com/marketing-y-ventas/geomarketing-habits-big-data/

  • Armengol E, Vicente Z (2019) Analysis of abstention in the elections to the catalan parliament by means of decision trees. In: Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence—16th International Conference, MDAI 2019, Milan, Italy, September 4–6, 2019, Proceedings, pp 248–258, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26773-5_22

  • Arowolo D, Aluko OA (2013) Democracy, political participation and good governance in Nigeria

  • Blais A, Kostelka F (2015) The decision to vote or abstain in the 2014 European elections. Revue européenne des sciences sociales 2015/1(53–1):79–04

    Google Scholar 

  • Blais A, Pilet J, Straeten K, Laslier J, Héroux-Legault M (2014) To vote or to abstain? An experimental test of Rational Calculus in First Past the Post and PR elections. Electoral Stud. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.07.001

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Castela E, Villardón MPG (2011) Inferencia ecológica para la caracterización de abstencionistas: El caso de Portugal (in Spanish). Spatial Organ Dyn 3:6–25

    Google Scholar 

  • Cazorla-Martín A, Rivera-Otero JM, Jaráiz-Gulías E (2017) Structural analysis of electoral abstention in the 2014 european parliamentary elections. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas pp 31–50

  • Daoust J, Blais A (2017) How much do voters care about the electoral outcome in their district? Representation 53(3–4):233–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2018.1424028

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferreira P, Dionisio A (2008) Voters dissatisfaction, abstention and entropy: analysis in European countries. Tech. Rep. 2008-11, University of Evora, CEFAGE-UE (Portugal), https://ideas.repec.org/p/cfe/wpcefa/2008_11.html

  • Gill J (2005) An entropy measure of uncertainty in vote choice. Electoral Studies 24(3):371–392, http://www.utdallas.edu/dept/socsci/hclarke/es/

  • Holland I, Miskin S (2002) Interpreting election results in Western Democracies. Current Issues Brief no2 2002-03 Politics and Public Administration Group Parliament of Australia https://www.aph.gov.au/About _Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_L

  • King G (1997) A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem. Princeton University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Kirchgässner G (2003) Abstention because of indifference and alienation, and its consequences for party competition: a simple psychological model. University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2003 2003–12, Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen

  • Leighley JE, Vedlitz A (1999) Race, ethnicity, and political participation: competing models and contrasting explanations. J Polit 61(4):1092–1114

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • López de Mántaras R (1991) A distance-based attribute selection measure for decision tree induction. Mach Learn 6:81–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maimon O, Rokach L (eds) (2010) Data mining and knowledge discovery handbook, 2nd edn. Springer

    Google Scholar 

  • Nwankwo C, Okafor U, Asuoha G (2017) Principal component analysis of factors determining voter abstention in South Eastern Nigeria. J Pan Afr Stud 10:249–273

    Google Scholar 

  • Quinlan JR (1979) Discovering rules by induction from large collection of examples. In: Michie D (ed) Expert systems in the microelectronic age. Edimburg Eniversity Press, pp 168–201

    Google Scholar 

  • Quinlan JR (1986) Induction of decision trees. Mach Learn 1(1):81–106

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosema M (2007) Low turnout: Threat to democracy or blessing in disguise? Consequences of citizens’ varying tendencies to vote. Electoral Stud 26(3):612–623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2006.10.007

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Solt F (2008) Economic inequality and democratic political engagement. Am J Polit Sci 52(1):48–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Villardón MPG (1986) Una alternativa de representación simultánea: HJ-Biplot (in Spanish). Questiio 10:13–23

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the AIS Group enterprise for having given us the Habits\(^{\copyright }\) Data Base in a selfless way. This research is funded by the project PID2019-111544GB-C21 of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Funding

This research was supported by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Grant 201650E044) and Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (Grant 2014-SGR-118).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIC - Spanish Council for Scientific Research, IIIA - Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Catalonia, Spain

    Eva Armengol & Àngel García-Cerdaña

Authors
  1. Eva Armengol
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Àngel García-Cerdaña
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eva Armengol.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Armengol, E., García-Cerdaña, À. Discovering abstentionist profiles in 2015 Catalan elections. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 14, 15861–15874 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-021-03123-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-021-03123-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation