TO: Y200 Students The following is an excerpt from the elections chapter of Keeping the Republic.  (Copies of the book are on reserve in the Research Collection, WH200.) 15 Voting, Campaigns and Elections

In the fall of 1998, Governor Pete Wilson of California signed a bill moving his state's primaries, the statewide elections held to choose the delegates who will choose the parties' nominees for office, to the first Tuesday in March. It was only in 1996 that the California primaries had been moved to late March from June. New Jersey quickly followed California's example. The day after Wilson signed his bill, New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman proposed that New Jersey would hold its primary on the same day, joining not only California but New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland as well. She invited Pennsylvania and Delaware to join them, hoping to create a regional eastern primary presence on that day (March 7, in 2000). Fearing that, with candidates and media attention focused on the coasts, the area in between, the "fly over" zone would be forgotten, representatives from eight western states proposed their own regional primary date, a Big Sky Primary, to be held shortly after the March 7 bicoastal primaries, perhaps on the following Saturday.

All this strategic primary rearrangement is nothing new. While the primary season, always launched by the early caucuses in Iowa and the first primary in New Hampshire, has traditionally run from February to June of the year of a presidential election, the process of front-loading, or moving the dates up earlier to maximize a state's impact in choosing the presidential nominees, has been going on for a while. In 1988, eleven southern states, seeking to maximize their clout, joined up to have their primaries on the second Tuesday in March, a day they called "Super Tuesday." In 1996, five New England states also held their primaries together in early March, followed two weeks later by four Midwestern states in a "Great Lakes Primary." Seventy percent of all the delegates to the national conventions had been chosen by the end of March. To keep states from scheduling their primaries even earlier, both the Democratic and Republican national parties have adopted rules to prevent any primaries, except New Hampshire's, from taking place earlier than the first week of March.⁽¹⁾

Two trends are apparent here -- states are trying to move their primaries earlier in the season, and they want to cluster them by geographical region.⁽²⁾ The states and the regions to which they belong clearly want to maximize the power that they will have in nominating presidential candidates, and they want to insure that candidates must pay attention to the issues that affect their parts of the country. But as the states scramble to enhance their own power, many other consequences for presidential elections are likely to follow, not all of them intended or desirable. Remember that when political rules change, the likely winners and losers change as well. The changes in the presidential nomination process that have been taking place in recent election years have direct consequences for who is likely to get the nomination, and who is likely to lose. Just what is at stake in the primary front-loading? Keep these issues in mind as you read about elections in American, and we will return to this question at the end of the chapter.

_____________________________________________________________________
 

Although we pride ourselves on our democratic government, Americans seem to have a love-hate relationship with the idea of campaigns and voting. On the one hand, many citizens believe that elections do not accomplish anything, that elected officials ignore the wishes of the people, and that government is run for the interests of the elite few rather than the many. Only about half of the eligible electorate have turned out to vote in recent presidential elections.

On the other hand, however, when it is necessary to choose a leader, whether the captain of a football team, the president of a dorm, or a local precinct chairperson, the first instinct of most Americans is to call an election. Even though there are other ways to choose leaders -- picking the oldest, the wisest, the strongest, holding a lottery or asking for volunteers -- Americans almost always prefer to call an election. We elect over half a million public officials in America.⁽³⁾ This means we have a lot of elections. "To an extent that astonishes a foreigner, modern America is about the holding of elections" wrote Anthony King, a British elections expert.⁽⁴⁾ And King is right, Americans have more elections more often for more officials than any other democracy.

In this chapter we will examine the complicated place of elections in American politics and American culture. We will consider

• what the founders were thinking when they set aside a role, although a fairly limited one, for elections in the Constitution, and what potential roles can exist for elections in a democracy,
• Americans' ambivalence about the vote and the reasons why only about half of the citizenry even bother to exercise what is supposed to be a precious right,
• how voters go about making decisions, and how this in turn, influences the character of presidential elections,
• the organization and strategic aspects of running for the presidency,
• reflections on what elections mean for citizens.

Most of the nations of the world today hold competitive elections, that is, free elections where voters face a real choice among different alternatives, to select their top governmental leaders. This is truly rare in world history. Up until the last couple of hundred years, it was virtually unthought of that the average citizen could or should have any say in who would govern. Rather, leaders were chosen by birth, by the Church, by military might, by the current leaders, but not by the mass public. Real political change, when it occurred, was usually ushered in with violence and bloodshed.

Today, global commitment to democracy is on the rise. Americans and, increasingly, other citizens around the world, believe that government with the consent of the governed is superior to imposing government on unwilling subjects and that political change is best accomplished through the ballot box rather than on the battlefield or on the streets. The mechanism that connects citizens with their government, by which they signify their consent, and through which they accomplish peaceful change is elections. Looked at from this perspective, elections are an amazing innovation -- they provide a method for the peaceful transfer of power that allows people to avoid violence. Quite radical political changes can take place without blood being shed, a political accomplishment that would strike awe and bemusement into the hearts of most of our political ancestors.

As we saw in Chapter 1, however, proponents of democracy can have very different ideas about how much power citizens should exercise over government -- elite theorists believe that citizens should confine their role to choosing among competing elites, pluralists think citizens should join groups who fight for their interests in government on their behalf, and participatory democrats call for more active and direct citizen involvement in politics. Each of these views has consequences for how elections should be held. How many officials should be chosen by the people? How often should elections be held? Should people choose officials directly, or through representatives that they elect? How accountable should officials be to the people who elect them?

We have already seen, in Chapter 12, that Americans do not resemble very much the informed, active citizens that democratic theory prescribes, but that that does not mean that they are unqualified to exercise political power. At the end of this chapter, when we have a clearer understanding of the way that elections work in America, we will return to the question how much power citizens should have and what different answers to this question mean for our thinking about elections. We begin our study of elections, however, by examining the functions that they can perform in democratic government, first by looking at the very limited role that the founders had in mind for popular elections when they designed the American Constitution, and then by evaluating the claims of democratic theorists more generally.
 

The Founder's Intentions

The Constitution set up by the founding fathers reflects their fears that people could not reliably exercise wise and considered judgment about politics, that they would be prone to band together with like-minded people to fight for their interests, and that their political role should therefore be limited. Consequently, the Founders built a remarkable layer of insulation between the national government and the will of the people. The president was to be elected by an electoral college and not directly by the people. The founders were afraid that the people might be persuaded by some popular but undesirable leader. The electoral college was expected to be a group of wiser men who would exercise prudent judgment. We discuss shortly how the role of the electoral college has evolved, but for now, its first significance is that the founders did not trust the citizenry to make a judgment about who should be president. In fact, only one-half of one-third of the government -- the House of Representatives -- was to be popularly elected. The Senate and the executive and judicial branches were to be selected by different types of political elites who could easily check any moves that might give into the whims of the masses but which, in the Founder's views, would be unwise.

This relatively high level of pessimism on the part of the Founders grew out of their experience with practical democracy under the Articles of Confederation as we discussed in Chapter 3. After the Revolution, workers, artisans and farmers won substantial influence in the new state governments, and in many cases passed laws, such as those favoring debtors, which alarmed the Founders. In their view, the government needed the support of the masses, but it could not afford to be led by what they saw as their short-sighted and easily mis-guided judgment.
 

The Role of Elections

Despite the founders' reluctance to entrust large amounts of political power to American citizens, we have since altered our method of electing senators to make these elections direct, and the electoral college, as we shall see, almost always endorses the popular vote for president. As we said in the introduction to this chapter, elections have become a central part of American life, even if our participation in them is somewhat uneven. Theorists claim that elections fulfill a variety of functions in modern democratic life: selecting leaders, giving direction to policy, developing citizenship, informing the public, containing conflict, legitimating and stabilizing the system. Here we examine and evaluate how well elections fill some of those functions.
 

Selection of Leaders

One way we define democracy is in terms of how leaders are chosen. If they are selected by a small group of those already in power, if power is inherited, or if the rule goes to the one with the strongest private army, we do not have democracy. If the leaders of a community or nation emerge from open competition in which those subject to rule each have a more or less equal say in who rules, we have a democracy. But is this an effective way to find the best leaders?

Like our founders, many philosophers and astute political observers have had doubts about whether elections are the best way to choose wise and capable leaders. Plato, for example, likened choosing the head of state to choosing the captain of a ship. To safely guide a ship to its destination requires experience, wisdom, good judgment and keenly developed skills. He argued that as we would never elect the captains of our ships, neither should we entrust the difficult job of finding suitable leaders to unskilled and uneducated masses. John Stuart Mill, often regarded as a proponent of democracy, argued that "[T]he natural tendency of representative government...is toward collective mediocrity; and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community."⁽⁵⁾ In short, the argument is that you cannot trust the average citizen to make wise choices in the voting booth.

Another argument about why democratic elections do not always choose the best leaders is that the electoral process and political process scare off many of the most capable candidates. Running for office is a hard, expensive and bruising enterprise. A lot of good and capable people are put off by the process, even though they may do an excellent job and have much to offer through public service. Colin Powell, for example, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush and Clinton, was clearly one of the most popular candidates going into the 1996 presidential elections; polls showed him well ahead of the competition. But he looked at what the process demanded and decided not to run. Indeed, many of the most obvious possible contenders for the presidency regularly decide not to run.

The simple truth is that elections only insure that the leader chosen is the most popular on the ballot. There is no guarantee that the most capable will run, or that even that the people will choose the wisest, most honest, or most capable leader from the possible candidates.
 

Policy Direction

Democracy and elections are only partially about choosing able leadership. The fears of the founders notwithstanding, today we also expect that the citizenry will have a large say in what the government actually does. Competitive elections are intended in part to insure that leaders remain responsive in some degree to the concerns of the governed. In this policy guidance perspective officials are seen much like the employees of the people. Just as the employer's ability to fire an employee is supposed to keep him or her in compliance with the employers' wishes, elections are supposed to keep politicians doing the will of the people.

The policy impact of elections, however, is indirect. For instance at the national level we elect individuals, we do not vote on policies. While in about half of the states citizens have access to the initiative and referenda by which policies are made directly via the ballot box, the founders left no such option at the national level. Rather they provided us with a complicated system in which power is divided and checked. Those who stand for election have different constituencies and different terms of office. All of this means that the different parts of the national government respond to different publics at different times. The voice of the people is muted and modulated, and subject to constant media interpretation. In short, elections at the national level do have policy consequences, but they are indirect and general. At times, however, especially when there is a change in the party that controls the government, elections do produce rather marked shifts in public policy.⁽⁶⁾ The New Deal of the 1930s is an excellent case in point.

The electoral process actually does a surprisingly good job of directing policy in less dramatic ways as well. A good deal of research demonstrates, for example, that in the states elections achieve a remarkable consistency between the general preferences of citizens and the kinds of policies that the states enact.⁽⁷⁾ At the congressional level, members of the House and the Senate are quite responsive to overall policy wishes of their constituents, and those who are not tend to suffer at the polls.⁽⁸⁾ At the presidential level, through all of the hoopla and confusion of presidential campaigns, scholars have found that presidents do, for the most part, deliver on the promises that they make and that the national parties do accomplish much of what they set out in their platforms.⁽⁹⁾ Finally, elections speed up the process by which changes in the public's preferences for a more activist or less activist (more liberal or more conservative) government are rather systematically translated into patterns of public policy that reflect these changing moods.⁽¹⁰⁾
 

Citizen Development

Some theorists believe that participation in government, in and of itself, is valuable for the citizens, and that elections help serve the function of making citizens feel fulfilled and effective. They claim that our feelings about ourselves and our relationship to others is surely influenced by our ability to participate in the decisions that shape our lives.⁽¹¹⁾ Where individuals are unable to participate in political affairs, or fail to do so, their sense of political efficacy, which is the sense of being effective in political affairs, suffers. Empirical evidence supports these claims. In studies of the American electorate, people who participate more, whether in elections or through other means, have higher senses of political efficacy.⁽¹²⁾ From this perspective, then, elections are not just about picking leaders and having the opportunity to get a preferred set of policies, they are about realizing and developing essential human characteristics. They present a mechanism by which individuals can move from passive subjects who see themselves pushed and pulled by forces larger than themselves, to active citizens fulfilling their potential to have a positive effect on their own lives.
 

Informing the Public

When we watch the circus of the modern presidential campaign, it may seem a bit of a stretch to say that one of the important functions of elections, and the campaigns that go along with them, is to educate the public. But they actually do. Ideally, the campaign is a time of deliberation in which alternative points of view are openly aired so that the citizenry can judge the truth and desirability of competing claims, the competence of competing candidates and parties. And, the evidence is that campaigns do have this impact. People actually seem to learn a good deal of useful political information from campaign advertisements, and over the course of the presidential campaigns, we see for the most part that people choose the candidates who match their value and policy preferences.⁽¹³⁾ As citizens we probably know and understand a lot more about our government because of our electoral process than we would without free and competitive elections.
 

Containing Conflict

Elections help us influence policy, but in other ways they also limit our options for political influence.⁽¹⁴⁾ When groups of citizens are unhappy about their taxes, or the quality of their children's schools, or congressional appropriations for AIDS research or any other matter, the election booth is their primary avenue of influence. They can write letters and sign petitions, but those only have an impact because the officials they try to influence must stand for reelection. Even if their candidate wins, there is no guarantee that their policy concerns will be satisfied. And were they to complain, they are mostly likely to be met with the system-wide response: if you don't like what is going on, change things with the ballot box.

If elections help reduce our political conflicts to electoral contests, they also operate as a kind of safety valve for citizen discontent. There is always a place for those who are unhappy to vent their energy and, quite significantly, it is a relatively peaceful mechanism. Elections can change people, replacing Democrats with Republicans, or vice versa, but they do not fundamentally alter the underlying character of the system. In this sense, elections channel conflict and discontent so that it does not threaten the system. Without the electoral vent, citizens would eventually turn to more threatening mechanisms like boycotts, protests, civil disobedience and rebellion.
 

Legitimization and System Stability

A final important function of elections is to make the outcome acceptable to participants. By participating in the process of elections, we implicitly accept, and thereby legitimize, the results. It is as though we accept an unspoken contract; when we play the game we agree to accept the outcome.

The genius here is that participation tends to make political results acceptable even to those who lose in an immediate sense. They do not take to the streets, set up terrorists cells, or stop paying their taxes. Rather, in the overwhelming majority of instances, citizens who lose in the electoral process shrug their shoulders, obey the rules made by the winning representatives, and wait for their next chance to achieve candidates and policies to their liking. In many cases, they eventually win. Some change occurs, but without grave threats to the stability of the system.
 

Who What and How?

Elections are a pervasive aspect of American political life. We have more elected officials and more opportunities to vote than any other democracy in the world. Those with the greatest stake in the continued existence of elections in America are the citizens who live under their rule. What they have at stake is, first, the important question of which candidates and parties will govern. It is about power; who will be able to wield the very considerable authority of the various governments of the U.S. This, in itself, is no small matter. However, by viewing elections in a broader perspective, we can see that there is a good deal more at stake than the immediate wins and losses. Elections also contribute to the quality of democratic life. They help to define a crucial relationship between the governed and those they choose as leaders. In addition, we have seen that elections serve to influence public policy, to educate the citizenry, to legitimize political outcomes and decisions, and thereby, to contribute to political stability.
 

WHO are the actors?	WHAT do they want?	HOW do they get it?
Citizens	Wise Choice of Leaders Influence Public Policy Legitimacy and Stability Quality of Democratic Life	Elections

 

Exercising the Right to Vote in America

We have argued, Chapter 12, on Public Opinion, that even without being well-informed and following campaigns closely, Americans can still cast intelligent votes, reflective of their best interests. But what does it say about the American citizen that in presidential elections barely half of the adult population votes? In off-year congressional elections, in primaries, and in many state and local elections held at different times from the presidential contest, the rates of participation drop even lower.

How do we explain this low voter turnout? Is America just a nation of political slackers? This is a serious and legitimate question in light of the important functions of democracy we have just discussed, and in light of the tremendous struggle which many groups have had to achieve the right to vote. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 6, the history of American suffrage (the right to vote) is one struggle after another of excluded groups gaining access to the ballot box.

Voting varies dramatically in its importance to different citizens. For some, it is a significant aspect of their identities as citizens. Eighty-two percent of American adults believe that voting in elections is "an essential" or "very important" obligation of Americans.⁽¹⁵⁾ Thus, many people vote because they believe this is what they should do, and because they believe that they can have a real influence on government this way. However, only about half the electorate feels this way strongly enough to vote in recent presidential elections.
 

Who Votes and Who Doesn't?

Many political observers, activists, politicians and political scientists have worried about the extent of non-voting in the United States.⁽¹⁶⁾ When people do not vote they have no say in choosing their leaders, their policy preferences are not registered, and they do not develop as active citizens. Some observers fear that their abstention signals an alienation from the political process.

We know quite a lot about nonvoters in America. Age, education, income and racial/ethnic status are among the main demographic factors used to separate voters and non-voters.

• •Age Only 59 percent of those aged 18-29 report voting. Turnout increases with age, so that among those 40 and over reported turnout runs above 80 percent.⁽¹⁷⁾
• •Income Turnout among the relatively wealthy (incomes above $50,000) is 89 percent and drops with income so that only 59 percent of the poor (incomes less than $10,000) report voting.
• •Race and Ethnicity Blacks (68 percent) and Hispanics (64 percent) vote less frequently than Whites (78 percent) and Asians (71 percent.)

Why Americans Don't Vote

Not only do large numbers of Americans fail to vote, but the percentage of those who do not vote has grown over time, despite the increase of characteristics like education, age of population, and income which should increase the number of voters.⁽¹⁹⁾   (See Figure 1). When Americans are compared to citizens of other democratic nations, our turnout levels are low -- almost at the bottom of the list. What accounts for low turnout rates in a country where 82 percent of adults say voting is important to democracy, indeed in a country that often prides itself on being one of the best and oldest examples of democracy in the world? The question of low and declining voter turnout in the United States poses a tremendous puzzle for political scientists who have focused on six factors to try to explain our turnout mystery.

Systemic Explanations

The case of voting turnout provides a dramatic illustration of the theme that rules make a difference in who wins and who loses in politics. The rules that govern elections vary in democracies around the world, yielding very different rates of turnout, as we have seen. Several elections rules in the United States contribute to low turnout in America by making it more difficult for voters to exercise their right to vote. The low turnout may be an accidental consequence of laws intended for other purposes, but in some cases it is the deliberate goal chosen by politicians who believe that high turnout will benefit the other party, or be harmful to stable government.

One election law that lowers voter turnout in the United States is the requirement that citizens register before they vote. Usually voters must register well before the campaign has even begun and before they are engaged enough in the issues or personalities to think they might want to vote. About a third of the electorate never registers and is therefore ineligible to vote on Election Day. In many other democracies it is government, not the individual voter, who bears the responsibility of making sure that citizens are registered, and if voters do not vote it is not because they neglected to register months before. in a number of countries, Australia, Belgium and Italy for example, voting is actually required by law. Note how high the turnout rates are in those countries! The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, or Motor Voter Bill as it is more commonly called, required that the states take a more active role in registering voters, allowing them to register when they applied for a drivers' license, for welfare, or for other state benefits. As a result of the bill, there has been a big increase in the number of registered voters, but, after a mild increase in 1992, turnout on Election Day has continued to decline. At best, Motor Voters' effects seem to have been to slow the decline in turnout.⁽²⁰⁾

Beside registration, other factors make voting in America more difficult than it typically is in European democracies. In the U.S. our laws allow for a lot of elections. We vote for President (and other offices) every four years, but then two years later we vote in midterm elections. There are also the primary elections, which take place the spring before each November election. In most states, there are also local elections, and votes on local issues or taxes, held in the spring of odd numbered years. Thus, citizens in the U.S. are asked to trek to the polls often eight to twelve times over a four year period; in contrast, most Europeans are only asked to vote two or three times. The evidence suggests that frequency of voting leads to voter fatigue.

Another law that lowers U.S. participation in elections is the requirement that national elections be held on Tuesdays, when many people find it hard to get off work, or to juggle waiting on line at the polls with their normal weekday tasks. It seems that many Americans just do not vote as a result. In contrast, a large majority of the European nations have weekend voting, which contributes to their higher turnout levels. The research on this suggests that allowing weekend voting would increase turnout by 5 or 6 percent.⁽²¹⁾ Moreover, voters seem to like the idea. In one poll, 59 percent of those who did not vote in 1998 said they would be "more likely" to vote if given the opportunity to do so on the weekend.⁽²²⁾

In an effort to save money on electoral administration, and also to make it easier for Oregonians to vote, Oregon is experimenting with voting-by-mail. It seems to work: one study indicated that allowing vote by mail increased turnout in the Beaver state by 6 percent. More generally, estimates are that vote-by-mail can increase participation by around 4 percent.⁽²³⁾

The United States is unlikely to pass major electoral reform any time soon, because politicians are wary about who the beneficiaries of such changes would be. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats would benefit from efforts to increase turnout, because Republicans are already motivated enough to turnout under current laws, but this expectation (or fear) does not seem to have been borne out by our experience with the Motor Voter Bill. The clear lesson, here, however, is that rules do matter, and if the U.S. chose to do so it could raise its levels of voter participation by enacting electoral reforms easing registration, reducing the number of elections, and changing the election day.
 

Attitude Changes
 

Political scientists have found that some of the decrease in electoral turnout  is accounted for by changes over time in psychological orientations, or attitudes.⁽²⁴⁾ One of these is the voter's sense of political efficacy, the feeling that citizens can be effective in dealing with their government and that government is responsive to their wishes. If people feel that they do not or cannot make a difference, they often don't bother to try. Lower feelings of political efficacy lead to less participation

A second orientation that has proved important in explaining low turnout is partisanship. As we saw in Chapter 13, there was a distinct decline in Americans' attachments to the two major political parties from the 1950s through the 1970s. With a drop in party identification, came lower turnout. This decline, however, has leveled off, and in recent years there has even been a slight increase in the percentage of citizens saying they identify as Democrats or Republicans. This slight increase in partisanship, however, has not been sufficient to offset declines in turnout.

Attitudes, of course do not change without some cause. They are to a large extent just a register of citizen reactions to what they see in the political world. Looking over the time period from the 1950's to the present it is easy to understand why attitudes would change. The tranquility of the 1950s was broken in a major way by the Civil Rights movement of the early and mid 1960s, and then by the counter cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Closely following this the nation's leadership headed in a number of highly unpopular directions: the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration's Watergate scandal, the Jimmy Carter years of pessimism and dismay, the Regan administration's Iran-Contra affair, which spilled into the Bush years, and the numerous sex and financial scandals that haunted the Clinton administration. All these yielded sustained negative information and images about the leadership of the national government which is reflected in negative attitudes toward government (lower feeling of efficacy and government responsiveness) and a tendency to withdraw from politics (lower levels of identification with political parties).
 

Lower Levels of Mobilization

Another factor that political scientists believe has led to lower turnout is a change in the strategies of the political parties. Parties in recent years have devoted much less energy to voter mobilization than they used to. Voter mobilization is the parties' efforts to be sure that party supporters are informed about the election and that they turnout to vote, whether through phone calls, knocking on doors, or even supplying rides to the polls. Party efforts through the 1980s and 1990s tended to concentrate on helping candidates, especially with campaign organization and television, rather than mobilizing voters.⁽²⁵⁾ The drop in mobilization efforts are claimed to account for a substantial portion of the decline in voting.⁽²⁶⁾

The reduction in the mobilizing role of party has had particular consequences for the turnout of those voters lower down on the socio-economic scale. As we mentioned above, socioeconomic status (education, income, occupation etc.) have all long been correlated with whether a citizen votes. One explanation is that as the parties make fewer efforts at mobilizing voters, those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are less likely to be contacted at all, less likely to have friends who promote participation, and have fewer resources to make sense of politics on their own.⁽²⁷⁾

The consequences of this reduced effort by parties to turn out lower educated, lower income voters are great. Researchers know that the gap between the have's and have not's has gotten larger. A good deal of the decline in turnout is occurring among those in the lower reaches of the socioeconomic strata. This can be seen in very clearly in Figure 2. Here we isolate the youngest citizens (ages 18-30) and look at the differences in turnout in presidential elections by decade. The college graduates always participate at higher rates than those who did not finish high school. This confirms what we have said about the importance of education for participation. But the figure shows that this gap between educational groups is growing. The drop in participation is primarily among the lower strata; the top educational category shows about an even level of turnout across the decades.

Decrease in Social Connectedness

Some of the decline in voter turnout is due to larger societal changes rather than to citizen reactions to parties and political leaders. Social connectedness refers to the number of organizations people participate in and how tightly knit their communities and families are -- that is, it refers to how well integrated they are into the society in which they live. The evidence is that people are increasingly likely to live alone, be single, be new to their communities or isolated from organizations. As individuals loosen or loose altogether their ties to the larger community, they have less stake in participating in communal decisions, and have less support for participatory activities. Lower levels of social connectedness have been an important factor in accounting for the declining turnout in national elections.⁽²⁸⁾
 

Generational Changes

Another factor in accounting for declining turnout is generational changes, the idea we examined in Chapter 12, Public Opinion, that events that happen in the formative years of a generation, as it comes of age politically, continue to shape its members' orientation to politics throughout their lives. This is different from the observation that people are more likely to vote as they get older. For instance, those age groups (cohorts) that came of age after the 1960s show much lower levels of attachment to politics, and they vote at lower levels than their parents or grand parents. Figure 3 shows the differences in age groups in partisanship and turnout in the 1996 election. The younger generation's parents were more partisan and voted at higher rates when they were younger.⁽²⁹⁾ Some research suggests that generational differences account for much or most of turnout decline. That is, people who once voted have not stopped voting; rather they are dying and are being replaced by younger, less politically engaged voters. The result is lower turnout overall.⁽³⁰⁾ The interesting question for the future is whether this lower level of civic involvement of recent generations will endure through middle age and into retirement.

The Rational Nonvoter

A final explanation offered to the puzzle of low voter turnout in America considers that for some people, not voting may be the rational thing to do. This explanation speculates that the question to ask is not "why don't people vote?" but rather, "why does anyone vote?" The definition of rational means that the benefits outweigh the costs. It is rational for us to do those things from which we get more back than we put in. Voting demands our resources, time, gas and other effort that we can ill afford in our busy lives. But if we view voting primarily as a way to influence government, and we get no other benefits from it, then from any individual's point of view, voting is largely a irrational thing to do. No one individual's vote can change the course of an election unless the election would otherwise be a tie and the probability of this happening in a presidential election is too small to calculate.

For many people, the benefits of voting go beyond the likelihood that they will affect the outcome of the election. In fact, studies have demonstrated that turnout decisions are not really based on individual's decisions that their vote will determine the outcome of the election. Rather, people achieve what are called expressive benefits from voting. It feels good to do what we think we are supposed to do, or to help, however little, the side we believe in. Or we get social rewards from our politically involved friends from voting (or avoid sarcastic remarks that come from not voting). All of these benefits from voting accrue whichever side wins!

For many people, then, the benefits (mostly expressive) outweigh the costs of voting. Consider Tiffany who is a young and successful lawyer. She needs to keep up with current affairs because her clients expect her to. As a result, she knows who she likes among those running. Her colleagues at the law firm expect her to vote as part of a general expectation that members of the firm will be active in the community. Of course, she knows the laws about registration and where to vote, and it is no problem to schedule appointments so she can skip out to vote without any problem. She feels good about voting. She can and will talk about the election with friends and family. For her, the rewards clearly outweigh the costs of voting.

Compare her to Jake who also works at the law office. He is the janitor who cleans up in the evenings. During the day Jake is a cashier at the 7-11 about a mile down the road. He has to work two jobs because he did not finish high school. It is about all he can do to try to keep his kids out of trouble, work both jobs, and try to make ends meet. The election comes and goes and Jake hardly takes notice. He does not keep up with the news so he does not know anything about who is running. He is not registered, and if he were, he would have a heck of a time getting his day boss to cover for him so he could get to the polls. He does not vote. And from his perspective, it makes perfect sense that he does not. In this sense, he is rational: the costs of voting would outweigh the benefits. In general, the costs of voting are higher for the groups of people that we earlier identified as less likely to vote.
 

Does Nonvoting Matter?

What difference does it make that some people vote and others do not? There are two ways to answer this question. One approach is to answer in terms of whether election outcomes would be different if non-voters were to participate. The other approach asks whether higher levels of non-voting indicate that democracy is not healthy. Both, or course are important potential consequences of low participation in our elections.
 

For Who Wins?

Studies of likely effects of non-voting come up with contradictory answers. A traditional, and seemingly logical, approach is to note that non-voters, being disproportionately poor and less educated have social and economic characteristics that are more common among Democrats than among Republicans. Therefore, were these people to vote, we could expect that Democratic candidates would do better. Some polling results from the 1998 elections support this thinking. Pollsters ask registered voters a number of questions to judge how likely it is that they will actually vote. When vote intentions for the House of Representatives of all registered voters and the subset of these who are likely voters are compared, the likely voters are distinctly more Republican (see Figure 4).  If this pattern were to hold generally, we could conclude that non-voting works to the disadvantage of Democratic candidates. John Petrocik found some evidence of this for the 1980 presidential election and concluded that much higher turnout among non-voters would have made the election closer and that Carter might even have won reelection.⁽³¹⁾

Undermining this interpretation are findings from most other presidential elections. There we find that non-voters' preferences are quite responsive to the short term factors so that they go disproportionately for the winning candidate. This is because they are less partisan and have less intensely held issue positions so they are moved more easily by the short term campaign factors favoring one party or the other. In most presidential elections, non-voters participation would only have increased the winner's margin slightly, or not changed things at all.⁽³²⁾ The potential effects of non-voters being mobilized, therefore is probably not as consistently pro-Democratic as popular commentary suggests. However, where it might have affected outcomes, as in the 1998 midterm elections or the 1980 presidential contest, the Democrats would have benefitted.
 

For Democracy?

Some observers have worried that non-voters represent a poorly socialized subset of the electorate, who if mobilized, represent a threat to democracy. The fear is that non-voters have less respect for civil liberties and the rights of minorities, and are thus susceptible to the rallying cries of a candidate or party who would threaten basic democratic procedures. An exhaustive analysis shows this is not the case. Across a wide battery of items relevant to democratic behaviors, the only consistent difference between voters and non-voters is information; voters are better informed.⁽³³⁾ Thus, while non-voting undoubtedly will continue to be a source of concern, the best evidence suggests that elections will not be dramatically different if reforms are successful in getting more voters to the polls.
 

Who What and How?

All political actors are not equal on election day. Some reduce their power considerably by failing to turn out to vote. The young, the less educated, the poor, and to an extent, minorities, are less likely to vote than citizens who are older, better educated, better off and white. Along with declining levels of turnout, the turnout gap between types of individuals has gotten larger. The result is that younger, less educated citizens are greatly under-represented among the active electorate.

Two things are at stake in the patterns of voter turnout we have been discussing. One is a question of representation and political power, the other a question of citizenship and the quality of democratic life. First, politicians live and die by the electoral process. While many would like to attend to the needs of all constituents equally, when push come to shove and they have to make hard choices, voters are going to be heeded more than silent non-voters.

A second issue at stake in low and declining turnout rates is, again, the quality of democratic life we spoke of earlier., and the stability and legitimacy of the system. The victor in close presidential elections, for example, must govern the country but, as critics often point out, as little as 25 percent of the eligible electorate may have voted for the winner. When a majority of the electorate sits out election, the fear is that the entire governmental process begin to lose legitimacy in the society at large. Non-voting is tied to citizen estrangement from the political process, and, in this view, the quality of democratic life itself depends upon active citizen participation.
 

WHO are the actors?	WHAT is at stake?	HOW do they get it?
Younger, Less Educated, Poorer Citizens and Minorities.	Lack of Electoral Power Lack of Representation of Interests	Systemic Barriers Changes in Attitudes Changes in Party Practices Decrease in Social Connectedness
Older, Well Off, White Citizens	Electoral Power	Ability to Overcome Barriers
All Citizens	Quality of Democratic Life	Increased Participation

 

The process of front-loading is intended by the states which participate in it to give their states more clout in the nomination process. Candidates spend more time in states with early primaries, hoping to gain "front runner" status and to be seen as viable players. They woo those early state's voters by paying attention to the issues that concern them and by promising to focus on those issues once in office. Iowa and tiny New Hampshire carry political weight all out of proportion to their size because of their protected status as the first state caucus and primary in a presidential election year. The winners of these early contests become the candidates to beat. Unexpected wins there, like Jimmy Carter's New Hampshire victory in 1976, can give a huge boost to a lagging campaign, and launch a candidate on the road to the White House. Conversely, a large number of well-known candidates have been weeded out because their early performances did not live up to media expectations. Examples include Sen. John Glenn's early departure from the Democratic field in 1984 and, in 1996, Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's poor showing.

Covetous of the attention states like New Hampshire get, other states have tried to jump on the early primary band wagon. But front-loading is likely to have other consequences for elections than simply altering which states get attention. With most of the states holding primaries in March, the nominations could be essentially sewn up by April, giving most Americans very little time to figure out what is going on and who stands for what, and thereby increasing the power of the already disproportionately powerful party activists who are always interested and informed. In addition, a nomination decision by the end of March would leave three months until the usual end of the primary season, and four or five until the nominations are made official at the parties' national conventions in the summer. With the national election campaign officially underway on Labor Day, there could be nearly six months between the ending of suspense over the nomination, and the campaign itself. The American public, already tired of an election season that lasts much longer than those in most other democracies, will have a very hard time sustaining interest through the politically fallow months of spring and summer, especially if they never had time to get truly engaged in the first place. Conversely, if the regionally and geographically clustered primaries succeed in splitting the votes for the competing candidates, so that no clear winner emerges from the primary process, then the nomination will have to be made in the national convention, returning power to that gathering that the primaries were meant to dilute, and dragging the public through a protracted and expensive campaign period during which all or most candidates remain viable until the end. In either scenario, the losers are the American voters, whose busy lives do not give them time to gear up for a two-step election process, one in March and one the following fall, and who are likely to tune out to politics even more than they do now, or to simply abdicate the nomination power to the more enthusiastic and interested political activists.

The American voters are not the only ones with something at stake in the front-loading process, however. The candidates themselves stand to be seriously affected by a process that requires them to have raised considerable funds early in the election year, before many of them are even familiar to average voters. The front-loaded system gives an advantage to candidates who have started fund-raising early or who are independently wealthy, whose names are well-recognized, and who are well organized early on. "Dark horses," who come from behind to win, like Jimmy Carter did in 1976, will have far less chance to introduce themselves to voters before the nomination choice is made. Candidates like George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, and Albert Gore, whose names are familiar to voters because of their relatives or other prominent jobs they have held, will have an advantage not necessarily tied to their ability to hold office.

Even the states who expect to prosper through front-loading may be surprised. A single New Hampshire, with lots of media attention, does have tremendous clout in the nomination process. But if all the other states cluster their primaries in the following weeks, few of them are likely to get the media and candidate attention they want. Front-loading presents us with a classic example of one of the main problems of collective action. It may be that all states would be better off with a drawn out primary season, perhaps one in which the order of the state primaries rotates so that different states or regions can take turns coming early. But it is in the interest of no state to voluntarily hang back and let everyone else go first. When the southern states moved up, the logic of the situation was for the other states to move up as well, and it may have produced a situation in which nobody wins, except party activists, and well-known, well-financed front-running candidates.
 

1. Todd S. Purdum, "California Joining Early-Bird States for Campaign 2000," The New York Times, September 29, 1998, p. 1.

2. Brad Knickerbocker, "Western States Hope There's Political Strength in Numbers," Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1998, p.3.

3. Gerald Pomper, Elections in America. New York: Dodd, Mead &Co., 1970, p. 1.

4. Anthony King, "Running Scared," The Atlantic Monthly (January, 1997) p. 41.

5. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), p. 114.

6. Brady, Davis W. Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making Stanford University Press, 1988. Babara Sinclair, "Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: The House of Representatives, 1925-1938" American Political Science Review, 71 (September, 1977): 940-54.

7. Robert S. Erikson, Gerald C. Wright and John P. McIver, Statehouse Democracy Cambridge U Press, 1993.

8. Robert Erikson and Gerald Wright, "Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections," in Dodd and Oppenheimer, Congress Reconsidered 6^th edition. CQ Press, 1997; Gerald C. Wright and Michael Berkman, "Candidates and Policy Position in U.S. Senate Elections," American Political Science Review 80 (June, 1986), 576-90.

9. Gerald Pomper with Susan Lederman, Elections in America. 2d edition, New York: Longman., 1980, Chps. 7,8; Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent, Reading, MA: Addison, 1982; Ian Budge and Richard I. Hofferbert, "Mandates and Policy Outputs: U.S. Party Platforms and Federal Expenditures, 1950-1985," American Political Science Review, 84 (March 1990): 248-261.

10. Robert S. Erikson, Michael MacKuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).

11. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

12. Sidney Verba, and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America. New York: Harper, 1972.

13. Thomas E. Patterson and Robert D. McClure. The Unseeing Eye. New York: Putnam, 1976; Andrew Gelman and Gary King, "Why Are American Presidential Polls So Variable When Votes Are So Predictable? British Journal of Political Science, 23 (October 1993): 409-51.

14. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent, Reading, MA: Addison, 1982.

15. Report on the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture, The Public Perspective, 8(February/March, 1997): 12.

16. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan.1993; Ruy A. Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter. Washington: Brookings Institution, 1992; . Raymond E Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone. Who Votes? New Haven: Yale, 1980. Richard J. Timpone, "Structure, Behavior, and Voter Turnout in the United States." American Political Science Review 92 (March, 1998.):145-58.

17. Source: Cumulative National Election Studies, 1996. These figures are for the 1992 and 1996 elections combined. Note, that in surveys such as this, "reported turnout" always runs higher than actual turnout. Part of the reason for this is who makes it into the sample (the homeless and institutionalized are not sampled and seldom vote) and part of the reason is that some nonvoters give what they see as the socially desirable response and say they voted.

18. Calculated by the authors for the 1992 and 1996 elections using the Cumulative National Elections Studies, 1996 data file.

19. Richard Brody, "The Puzzle of Political Participation in America," in Anthony King, The New American Political System. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1978: 287-324.

20. Stephen Knack, "Drivers Wanted: Motor Voter and the Election of 1996," School of Public Affairs, American University, unpublished paper, n.d.

21. Mark N. Franklin, "Electoral Participation," in Laurence LeDuc, Richard G Niemi and Pippa Norris, (eds), Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996, 226-30.

22. "Getting Voters to Vote" USA Today, December 4, 1998, p 1A.

23. The Oregon analysis is by Michael Traugott and Robert Mason and is reported in David Broder, "What Works" The Washington Post (Magazine) October 11, 1998, W09; the general analysis is reported in Mark N. Franklin, "Electoral Participation."

24. Ruy Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992, Chap. 2. and Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1998 Elections. Washington: CQ Press, 1999.

25. Paul Herrnson, Congressional Elections 2d edition, Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998.

26. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hanson. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan. 1993.

27. Steven J. Rosenstone and John Mark Hanson. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan. 1993.

28. Ruy Teixeira, The Disappearing American Voter. Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1992, pp. 36-50; Robert Putnam, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Current (June, 1995) 3-32.

29. Check Miller and Shanks pages for this point

30. Warren E. Miller and Merrill J. Shanks. The New American Voter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Kevin Chen, Political Alienation and Voting Turnout in the United States, 1969-1988. Mellon Research University Press, 1992. (**Get city )

31. John Petrocik, "Voter Turnout and Electoral Preference: The Anomalous Reagan Elections," in Kay Lehman Schlozman, ed., Election in America. Boston: Allen & Unwin, Inc., 1987. pp 239-260

32. John Petrocik, "Voter Turnout and Electoral Preference: The Anomalous Reagan Elections,"pp. 243-251; Stephen Earl Bennett and David Resnick, "The Implications of Nonvoting for Democracy in the United States," American Journal of Political Science 34 (August, 1990). p. 795.

33. Stephen Earl Bennett and David Resnick, "The Implications of Nonvoting for Democracy in the United States," American Journal of Political Science 34 (August, 1990).