Decisional abstentionism

Abstract

This article is based on the recognition that the institutional improvements of the procedural democracy have searched for greater shares of electoral participation, which have been crossed with the partial use of ordinal voting that suggests minor shares of electoral decision.
This observed difference between participation and decision making, is likely to be problematized as a type of abstentionism which originates from within the electoral system, thus proposing the category of “decisional abstentionism”, that can be defined as an indicator of absence of electoral decision, which measures the percentage of non-use of the entire ordinal vote of the citizens, who participating electorally do express their preferences for a political party and/or candidate for elected office.
Finally, the decisional abstentionism, as a mathematized concept for measuring the absence of the electoral decision of the voter that do participate electorally, allows to propose a change of paradigm for understanding electoral abstentionism, moving from a comprehension centered on the denial of participation, to a comprehension centered on the tension between the absence of participation and the absence of decision.