Differential Voter Turnout in a Post-Communist Muslim Society: The Case of the Kyrgyz Republic

Borrowing the dominant theoretical frameworks of studies of voter turnout in the developed world, this paper tests the applicability of these frameworks to a transitional democracy in a Muslim society. Using logistic regression, we estimate an individual’s likelihood of voting in Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections.We find that traditional rural networks, rather than networks of voluntary associations, play the central...