How does voter turnout affect the legitimacy of an election?

Accordingly, a few papers have recently modeled elections assuming that candidates and voters care about the margin of victory, as a measure of the electoral mandate (Castanheira, 2003; Faravelli et al., 2015; McMurray, 2017). However, when participation is voluntary, there is a second element that contributes to shaping the mandate and provides information about the electorate’s approval for the competing candidates: the turnout rate.