The purpose of this project was to examine the low electoral participation in the socioeconomic subject areas of Gothenburg and make a systematic survey of the reasons why. Attempts had been made to increase the electoral participation, but in the investigation the reasons why the efforts made were not sufficient will be explained. It will also be investigated what else affects the election besides socioeconomics.
To investigate this, four interviews were made with persons dealing with this subject in different ways. It was Kanza Rehman, who was an election ambassador in the North-east district during the election. Aldina Mehmedovic who works in the administration for democracy was also interviewed. Furthermore Radia Al-Masri, who had electoral work before the election, also got interviewed. The last interview was with Maria Solevid, who is an associate professor in political science and who, among other things, has researched electoral participation and electoral behavior.
The result showed that people’s will to wote depends on their opportunities to have confidence in democracy and to feel participation in society. It is explained that the social context is a large and important part of people exercising their right to vote. This means often that the most decisive reason for a person to vote is that the people in his vicinity do the same, which agrees well with previous research. The result also showed that electoral participation increases and decreases for natural reasons every year. The number of voters in a democracy can never be unchanged, because if it was it means that the country maybe was governed by undemocratic systems. It is also explained that ignorance and low trust in politicians can affect people’s voting behavior and result in lower participation.
The conclusion states that there are a variety of factors that affect a country’s electoral participation and all of these together influence people’s propensity to vote in different ways. In addition to socioeconomic factors that influence, factors such as exclusion, media reporting, new citizens in Sweden and the importance of social action are explained as reasons why the electoral participation decreased. These are therefore some of the reasons why the electoral participation has decreased, even though an increase was expected.