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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1485383

Democratically included? A systematic literature review on voter turnout of people with intellectual disabilities

Provisionally accepted
Björn Boman Björn Boman *Jonas Hultin Rosenberg Jonas Hultin Rosenberg
  • Mälardalen University, Västerås, Västmanland, Sweden

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The extent to which people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are voting is an underresearched area. In order to fill this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review with a focus on voter turnout and democratic inclusiveness among people with ID. In total, we found N = 9 studies that met our inclusion criteria, all of which were based on samples from Western countries such as Croatia, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and US. Our findings suggest that people with ID have substantially lower voter turnout than ordinary voters. Constraining factors for voting and other instances of democratic inclusion include educational limitations and physical obstacles at ballot places, as well as being under full guardianship. On the other hand, living in a household with a voter constitutes a facilitating factor. Because of the limited number of studies, we suggest that more basic quantitative and qualitative research in many countries ought to be conducted.

    Keywords: democratic inclusiveness, People with intellectual disabilities, Voter turnout, Intellectual Disability, cognitive ability

    Received: 23 Aug 2024; Accepted: 18 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Boman and Hultin Rosenberg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Björn Boman, Mälardalen University, Västerås, 721 23, Västmanland, Sweden

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