Abstención y voto nulo en las elecciones federales en México, 1991-2015

Electoral abstention and spoiled ballot are considered behaviors that frustrate democracy. The author asks if they can be analyzed as components of electoral participation. If so, its exclusion from analysis would hide the limits of our electoral system. With data from the federal deputies' elections for the 1991-2015 period, using Spearman correlations, Chi square tests and the Fowler gap index, the author notes that abstention and spoiled ballot are ineffective forms of electoral participation, although they both somehow function as punishment tools. Including these forms of participation in our system would allow shifting the center of the democratic process, from the electoral trade to the consolidation of political institutions aimed at public deliberation. This would help to eradicate the control that party structures exert over the electorate, making thus possible to have representative governments subject to accountability and retrospective evaluation by citizens.