Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.

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One important proposition about the distribution of coalition payoffs is found in W. A. Gamson's theory of coalition formation: “Any participant will expect others to demand from a coalition a share of the payoff proportional to the amount of resources which they contribute to a coalition.” This proposition is tested in a universe of cabinet coalitions existing in thirteen European democracies during the postwar period. Here, payoffs to partners are indicated by the percentage share of cabinet ministries received by parties for their percentage contribution of parliamentary seats/votes to the coalition.The proportionality proposition is shown to hold strongly. Disproportionality, however, is observed to occur in distributions at the extremities of party size—large parties tend to be proportionately underpaid and small parties overpaid, the larger or smaller they become. This effect, however, is most pronounced when the size of the coalition is small, and tends to reverse itself as the size of the coalition increases.

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