Estonia had parliamentary elections this past weekend, although living abroad I voted a while go already. In terms of results, I think the votes are getting increasingly concentrated with a couple of parties. This is understandable since the two winning parties - the Reform Party and the Center Party are the two oldest parties in the newly independent Estonia, and their stable presence probably gives more confidence to people over the other parties that split and merge, and rise and fall in their size and political activity.
The really good news, I think, is actually the high level of voter turnout - 62% of the voting population actually gave their vote. This gives a pretty good feeling about the broad-based legitimacy of the mandate the parliament and the cabinet will enjoy. If I am not wrong, then in the past decade already, the turnout has been dwindling slightly above 50%. e-voting certainly had its part to play, but only a 3.5% of voting population part, which does not really explain the whole increase in turnout. It is pretty common for citizens of a fairly developed democracy to become lazy about voting - people are usually happy enough with whatever they get anyhow, so there is not much of a drive to peel your ass off the comfy coach and go perform your civic duty.
It also doesn't really seem to be a protest vote type of election, since the two dominant parties currently in the government received a majority more dominant than in any previous year. As surprising as it seems considering that the second half of the term cabinets are usually more of the filler type and not very active, people seemed to go with it.
So what else made people go out and vote? Is it really money. As Raiko says, this year's elections saw the most expensive campaigns ever, and maybe the campaigns really reached more people than usual. Could be, though I still think that most campaigns are more focused on designing the preferences of the already active voting population than targeting the passive population. Then again, I was not in the country for most of the campaigning period, so I cannot say for sure, what the campaign tactics was.
Well, to make the long story short - I am pleasently surprised about the high voter turnout, but I haven't quite figured out what caused this. Once I find someone with a good analysis and explanation, I will enlighten you too :)
