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"Abstention"
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The Limited Use and Non-Use of Digital Tools and Technologies in the Activities of Political Parties in Poland
This article examines selected causes and manifestations of a limited use or outright non-use of digital technologies and tools by political parties in Poland. The analysis focuses on key areas of party activity within the digital ecosystem, particularly internal dimensions such as membership, party financing, internal e-voting, and decision-making processes. The research design combines a review of the existing literature, critical analysis of primary sources (including party websites and statutes), and original data derived from an expert survey.
Journal Article
Adapting to Electoral Changes: Insights from a Systematic Review on Electoral Abstention Dynamics
Electoral abstention has emerged as a critical challenge to democratic legitimacy, with rising rates observed globally. For example, in Portugal, the turnout declined from 91.5% in 1975 to 51.4% in 2022. This systematic review synthesizes multidisciplinary literature to identify key determinants of voter nonparticipation and their interactions, aiming to inform adaptive strategies to enhance civic engagement amid social, organizational, and technological changes. Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched five databases (Academic Search Complete, MEDLINE, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, PsycINFO, and Web of Science) from 2000 to August 2025 using terms such as “electoral abstention” and “non-voting.” Inclusion criteria prioritized quantitative empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, yielding 23 high-quality studies (assessed via MMAT, with scores ≥ 60%) from 13 countries, predominantly the USA and France. Results reveal abstention as a multidimensional phenomenon driven by three interconnected categories: individual factors (e.g., health issues like smoking and mental health trajectories, institutional distrust); institutional factors (e.g., electoral reforms such as biometric registration reducing abstention by up to 50% in local contexts, but with mixed outcomes in voluntary voting systems); and contextual factors (e.g., economic inequalities and urbanization correlating with lower turnout, exacerbated by events like COVID-19). This review underscores the need for integrated public policies addressing these factors to boost participation, particularly among youth and marginalized groups. By framing abstention as an adaptive response to contemporary challenges, this work contributes to the political psychology and democratic reform literature, advocating interdisciplinary approaches to resilient electoral systems.
Journal Article
When Doing Nothing Is the Optimal Cyber Defense: Quantum-Inspired Abstention as a First-Class Security Action
Cyber security usually favors action: when an abnormality is detected, systems react visibly (block, alert, rotate) even when evidence is weak. However, work on abstention and selective prediction shows that deferring commitment can be rational under uncertainty, trading coverage for lower expected risk. At the same time, operational realities such as alert overload and adaptive adversaries imply that visible defensive reactions can backfire by increasing analyst burden and providing feedback that supports attacker probing and policy inference. This paper presents quantum-inspired abstention as a first-class security action. Using a quantum decision-theoretic lens, I model defensive commitment as a “measurement” that collapses an uncertain belief state into an externally observable response, and I define abstention as deliberate non-commitment that suppresses or delays measurement when uncertainty and leakage risk are high. I integrate these ideas into a conceptual framework and a minimal loss decomposition separating security loss, operational cost, and leakage-driven adversarial learning. I illustrate the approach through SOC triage and network intrusion detection scenarios, and I provide a lightweight simulation that instantiates the trade-offs among these losses—without requiring quantum hardware.
Journal Article
Is It Still the Economy? Economic Voting in Polarized Politics
How does polarized politics affect electoral accountability? In this paper, I investigate the impact of political polarization on two channels through which voters can sanction incumbents for poor policy outcomes: voting for the opposition and abstaining. Using presidential election results at the county level, I show that, under polarized environments, the number of voters punishing the incumbent party for poor economic performances decreases in both channels. Survey analyses confirm that as the perceived ideological distance between parties increases, partisans are less likely to (i) negatively evaluate the economy when their party holds the Presidency and (ii) among those who have a negative view of the economy, they are less likely to penalize their party for negative economic assessments. These results show that polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction the incumbent party.
Journal Article
Unraveling the Heterogeneity of Electoral Abstention: Profiles, Motivations, and Paths to a More Inclusive Democracy in Portugal
Electoral abstention is a growing phenomenon in contemporary democracies, raising concerns about the representativeness and legitimacy of elected governments, particularly in Portugal where youth participation remains low. This study explores the heterogeneity of non-voting behavior by comparing insights from voters and non-voters through online focus groups. Employing content analysis on qualitative data from 42 participants, the research identifies distinct non-voter profiles, systemic barriers, and potential pathways to increased participation. Key findings reveal heterogeneous abstainer types—including disbelieving citizens, disinterested youth, pragmatic non-voters, and protest non-voters—driven by distrust, practical obstacles, and insufficient political literacy. Despite non-voting, many express conditional willingness to participate in high-stakes scenarios or following reforms. The study concludes that addressing these barriers requires holistic measures, such as enhanced civic education, technological voting modernization, and improved political representation, to foster trust and democratic engagement. These insights offer actionable recommendations for policymakers to enhance voter turnout and strengthen democratic legitimacy.
Journal Article
Theory and algorithms for learning with rejection in binary classification
We introduce a novel framework for classification with a rejection option that consists of simultaneously learning two functions: a classifier along with a rejection function. We present a full theoretical analysis of this framework including new data-dependent learning bounds in terms of the Rademacher complexities of the classifier and rejection families as well as consistency and calibration results. These theoretical guarantees guide us in designing new algorithms that can exploit different kernel-based hypothesis sets for the classifier and rejection functions. We compare our general framework with the special case of confidence-based rejection for which we also devise alternative loss functions and algorithms. We report the results of several experiments showing that our kernel-based algorithms can yield a notable improvement over the best existing confidence-based rejection algorithm.
Journal Article
Understanding Voter Fatigue: Election Frequency and Electoral Abstention Approval
The existing literature shows that frequent elections depress electoral participation and contribute to the global decline in voter turnout. However, the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This paper investigates the sources of voter fatigue and hypothesizes that frequent elections make electoral abstention more acceptable to citizens. It tests the main hypothesis via an original pre-registered survey experiment fielded in five countries with a total sample size of 12,221 respondents. The results provide pioneering evidence on the psychological effects of election frequency. They confirm that high election frequency increases the social acceptability of electoral abstention and that this effect is proportional to the number of past elections. It can be equally observed among all major social groups, including politically engaged citizens and those who believe that voting is a civic duty. These findings hold major implications for our understanding of voter turnout and democratic institutional engineering.
Journal Article
Identity Refusal
Following Scott’s recent sociology of nothing, we focus on the process of non-identification, wherein young adults seek to manage the risk of being marked by their non-participation in an important cultural practice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with undergraduate students we develop two overall identity refusal positions (resistance and othering), through which informants seek to disengage with the collective identity of the non-drinker. These positions are underlined by four categories of identity talk: denial and temporal talk (distancing through resistance), and disconnect and concealment talk (distancing through othering), which are used to repudiate non-drinking as culturally and personally meaningful respectively. We contribute understandings of how identities can be performed through active omission, developing Scott’s conceptualization and demonstrating how this can be a potentially planful process, depending on the extent to which individuals credit a particular object or activity with being a ‘something’.
Journal Article
Between exit and voice. Differential factors of abstentionists and populist voters in Portugal
This paper examines the relationship between the rise of populist support and increasing rates of abstention in European democracies. Empirical studies have shown that populist parties are gaining traction among voters, while abstention rates are also on the rise, particularly among “temporary” abstentionists who refrain from voting due to situational factors. We delve into this matter by utilising an original survey on a representative sample of the Portuguese population conducted in 2020. The findings suggest that there are similarities between voting for populist radical right parties and abstention, particularly in terms of “protest” attitudes, which set them apart from supporters of non-populist parties. Additionally, the study indicates that both phenomena are influenced by short-term factors related to the supply side of politics. However, abstentionists are more likely to belong to lower socio-economic strata and exhibit lower levels of political interest.
Este artigo analisa a relação entre o aumento do apoio aos partidos populistas e o aumento das taxas de abstenção nas democracias europeias. Estudos empíricos têm demonstrado que os partidos populistas estão a ganhar força entre os eleitores, enquanto as taxas de abstenção também estão a aumentar, particularmente entre os abstencionistas “temporários” que se abstêm de votar devido a fatores situacionais. Para aprofundar esta questão, recorremos a um inquérito original realizado em 2020 a uma amostra representativa da população portuguesa. Os resultados sugerem que existem semelhanças entre o voto em partidos populistas de direita radical e a abstenção, particularmente em termos de atitudes de “protesto”, que os distinguem dos apoiantes de partidos não populistas. Adicionalmente, o estudo indica que ambos os fenómenos são influenciados por fatores de curto prazo relacionados com o lado da oferta da política e que os abstencionistas são mais propensos a pertencer a estratos socioeconómicos mais baixos e a exibir níveis mais baixos de interesse político.
Journal Article