Filling in the Blanks, the Effect of Primary Elections on Valid Voting, Abstention and Blank-Null Votes: Investigating Different Forms of Electoral Participation and Their Responsiveness to Parties' Democratization

Party reforms are usually implemented to achieve multiple goals, from internal cohesion to electoral outcomes. However, few reforms have been embraced in such unison by parties with the common intent of increasing democratic participation as party primaries have been in the last ten years across Western democracies. As presented in a qualitative overview of a few case studies (i.e. Spain, Italy, Israel and France), parties publicly brand this change as the key to ``re-connect” with the citizens and bringing them back to politics.  But do they work? And if they do, through which mechanism? By  disentangling the concept of  electoral participation in its different components, protest/blank null voters, valid voters and abstentionists, it becomes possible to better understand the channels of causal impact of this type of reforms. This paper focuses empirically on the case of municipal elections between 1999 and 2010 in Italy. It  exploits  the staggered introduction and variation in terms of external imposition of primaries election across cities. It can, hence, investigates the differential impact of use of primaries to select the candidates have on different impact on different type of voters (protest/blank null voters, valid voters) and non-voters (abstentionists.)