a b s t r a c tAmong the wide range of theories explaining why some people vote and others do not, one is recently gaining particular popularity. This is the theory of voting as a habit (e.g. Plutzer, 2002;Franklin, 2004;Hooghe, 2004). The empirical evidence supporting this theory covers only Western democracies, so the following question might be asked: is this pattern universal? In the case of old democracies, voting is a habit acquired gradually in a process which starts at the moment of the very first election one can cast the ballot. In new democracies the situation is different, as we can pinpoint the starting moment (first democratic election), which is the same for different voters and thus different age cohorts. In this paper we investigate voting as a habit in new democracies, using data from the Polish National Election Study. We find that voting in Poland has some habitual aspect; repeated voting brings about a (sort of) habit, which has an intrinsic, irreducible effect on voter turnout. We also find that habit of voting is formed likewise in all age cohorts.

The Polish Panel Survey POLPAN provides data infrastructure to analyze the dynamics of social inequality from a life-course perspective. Historical events shape the study’s research design. In 1987–1988, 5,817 randomly sampled men and women aged 21–65 are interviewed in what is still state socialist Poland. Soon after, their lives are upended by the profound transformations that the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe triggered. To understand how people transition to the emerging social structure, close to half of the respondents are re-interviewed in 1993. This sample serves as a panel that we follow every 5 years, most recently in 2018. Since 1998, POLPAN waves feature renewal samples of the youngest cohort that become part of the panel. Participants are interviewed face-to-face on a wide range of topics, including educational and occupational careers, psychological functioning, physical and mental health, political behaviours, and social attitudes. These topics address POLPAN’s overarching research problem, how does social position influence individual biographies and social networks, and how do individual choices that peoples’ biographies and networks reflect, in turn influence their later social standing. A multi-dimensional approach to data quality informs POLPAN methodology and the decision to publicly share the project’s products, including datasets and analytic tools.

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