Abstract: In the countries with a consolidated democracy, but also in post-communist Romania, the turnout has experienced a downward evolution. The difference lies in the fact that while in Western European countries the turnout is higher as the economic and educational level is higher, in Romanian during the last general elections (2008), the turnout was higher in rural areas (traditionally more precariously from the economic and educational point of view than the urban areas). In this way, the article strives to identify to what extent there is a causal relationship between the development index of the rural localities and the turnout, the descriptive statistics highlighting a relevant aspect: there is a higher turnout in the less developed counties than in the developed ones.