Exploring citizen turnout and invalid voting in Indonesia: two sides of the same coin?

Scholarship on citizen turnout and invalid voting has developed along parallel trajectories. Many empirical studies investigate the determinants of turnout or invalid voting, but existing research hardly ever analyses the two together. Yet while turnout and invalid voting are conceptually distinct, their practice is closely intertwined. In this paper, we thus advocate the need for research jointly adopting these two different but complementary perspectives on participation. We illustrate the potential of this approach with an analysis of the 2014 legislative elections in Indonesia, the third largest democracy in the world. We exploit the exceptional subnational variation in electoral participation and socioeconomic development in this country by matching Indonesian Electoral Commission data with official statistics to create a rich districtlevel dataset. We find that turnout and invalid voting are associated with distinct but related mechanisms, which suggests the need of further research studying the two outcomes with unified research designs.