Measuring the civic duty to vote: A proposal

Civic duty is a central concept in the study of turnout, yet little attention has been paid to how it should be measured. After a careful review of previous measures we constructed an original battery of 13 questions that were administered in a survey conducted in seven countries at the time of the 2014 European election. We show that the battery indeed taps the duty construct. We then propose a reduced battery of four questions. We show that the four questions achieve good fit measures and pass several tests of robustness and validity across the seven countries. We invite researchers to implement this battery in future research.