The effects of election timing on national and subnational turnout in Canada

Where a considerable volume of work has been spent looking at the effects of voter fatigue in multi-level democracies, few work has looked at Canada as a unique case. Leveraging the specificity of the Canadian federation–level-specific party systems and electoral cycles–we show that there exists a strong and significant voter fatigue effect such that electoral turnout is lower in early, ‘snap’ elections and increases as does the time in weeks between elections, wherever the level at play. This is particularly important given that the stochastic nature of provincial and federal elections in Canada induces Canadians to go to the polls frequently–perhaps in part explaining the country’s turnout decline since the mid-1940s.