  A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the
statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes
according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in
different countries. Considering 11 countries without compulsory voting
(Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland,
Romania, Spain and Switzerland), a stylized fact emerges for the most populated
cities when one computes the entropy associated to the three ratios, which we
call the entropy of civic involvement of the electorate. The distribution of
this entropy (over all elections and countries) appears to be sharply peaked
near a common value. This almost common value is typically shared since the
1970's by electorates of the most populated municipalities, and this despite
the wide disparities between voting systems and types of elections. Performing
different statistical analyses, we notably show that this stylized fact reveals
particular correlations between the blank/null votes and abstentionists ratios.
  We suggest that the existence of this hidden regularity, which we propose to
coin as a `weak law on recent electoral behavior among urban voters', reveals
an emerging collective behavioral norm characteristic of urban citizen voting
behavior in modern democracies. Analyzing exceptions to the rule provide
insights into the conditions under which this normative behavior can be
expected to occur.
