The Threat of Absenteeism to Democracy: The Lithuanian Case of the Nation’s Quantitatively Weak Political Mandate

Abstract

The article examines the prospects for applying quantitatively weak political mandate terminology to explain the problems of current democratic politics. The author of the article argues that a weak political mandate is one of the main reasons for inadequate governance of a democratic state. The article analyses the data of (non) participation in the Seimas elections of the Republic of Lithuania in 2016, 2020 and 2024. After examining the formal (non)support of the voters, who participated in the elections and voted for the winning politician, and taking into accountthe number of all voters included in the electoral roll, the author poses a question: Do Lithuanian politicians, who secure low public support in the Seimas elections, rightly call themselves the representatives of the nation? Assuming that when a politician, who wins the elections in a single-member constituency, is usually formally supported by only 20–25% or even less of the voters registered in the electoral roll, and in a multi-member constituency 3–12%, such a representative is a priori distrusted by a large part of the society, i.e., those who did not support them, or did not participate in the elections. The indifferent attitude towards voters who do not participate in the elections is criticised, based on the provision that if a part of society does not participate in politics, it does not mean that it does not-consume and evaluate politics. More generally, the article focuses on the negative impact of absenteeism on representative democracy as the main form of democracy today. In addition, it also tries to answer how a quantitatively weak political mandate could be (still) made stronger.