The voter turnout in the European Union has been declining since its introduction in 1979. Previous studies have studied this phenomenon and given several reasons to why this is happening. The aim of this thesis is therefore to examine this phenomenon by studying several democratic institutions and their effect on member states voter turnout in the European Parliament. This is done by anchoring the several hypotheses in rational choice institutionalism and empirical institutionalism and testing them towards the result.
By using a multivariate regression analysis to analyze which variables might affect the European voter turnout, the variation in voter turnout between member states is studied. Such variables include national voter turnout, the distribution of seats in the European Parliament, obligatory voting, national election systems and more. The study found some significant relationships between voter turnout for the European parliament and national voter turnout, obligatory voting and differences between election systems between the national. Obligatory voting and differences in election systems have a big impact on voter turnout in the European parliament, whilst national voter turnout have a lower impact on turnout.