The Vanishing Voter Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty by Thomas E. Patterson Knopf, 196 pp., $25 Downsizing Democracy How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg Johns Hopkins University Press, 244 pp., $29.95 IS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN DECLINE? One popular barometer, voter turnout in national elections, would seem to suggest so. Consider the following: In the 1960 presidential election, 63 percent of the electorate cast ballots. By 1996, that number had dropped below 50 percent for the first time since 1924 (it climbed back slightly over 50 percent for the closely contested 2000 election). The numbers descend further in non-presidential years such as 2002, when, with control of both houses of Congress up for grabs, fewer than two in five bothered to vote. (By comparison, in last September’s national election in Slovakia–a country that didn’t exist a decade ago and which lacks a democratic tradition–the turnout rate was 70 percent.)
The U.S. turnout rate statistic is somewhat misleading, since the Census Bureau includes in its universe of eligible voters three disqualified subgroups: illegal immigrants, convicted felons, and prisoners. Since the modern voting percentage peaked in 1960, those populations have increased, accounting for some of the overall decline. Also frequently overlooked is the large state-to-state variation in voter turnout. Take the recent senatorial races in Minnesota (traditionally a high turnout state) and South Dakota: elections with national significance, large media interest, and robust get-out-the-vote campaigns. In both elections, turnout exceeded 60 percent. Clearly, under the right conditions, Americans can be motivated to turn out in significant numbers.
Still, there is no denying the overall downward trend, which has been strong enough to overcome a number of counter-trends, such as increased education levels, the enfranchisement of southern blacks, the relaxation of state residency requirements, and congressional passage in 1993 of the “Motor Voter” law.
To Thomas Patterson of the “Vanishing Voter Project” at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, the decline in turnout is alarming, since, as he writes in “The Vanishing Voter,” “electoral dysfunction typically stems from small electorates.” Where voter turnout is limited, the electorate is more likely to be dominated by “small and obdurate electorates” composed primarily of “hard-core partisans.” Patterson attributes the decline in campaign involvement and voting to a number of factors, most notably the disappearance of clear partisan divisions, increasingly protracted campaigns that lack suspense and fail to engage the electorate, and the rise of negative journalism.
The discovery of a link between low voter turnout and the declining strength and relevance of American political parties is not exactly new. Political parties are democracy’s only effective mechanisms for linking large numbers of citizens to political leaders. Unlike interest groups, which promote specific issues, parties recruit and field candidates and seek to maximize their vote percentages by making appeals to the electorate based upon broad notions of the common good. Although in the American context such appeals have rarely been shaped by rigid ideologies, historically the parties have nonetheless served as reliable electoral guides for ordinary citizens, irrespective of their level of political interest.
During the relatively lengthy period when the two major parties were essentially distinguished by economic issues, voters could identify easily with one or the other. This process both simplified voters’ decisions and gave them a stake in the outcome of elections. According to Patterson, the rise of social issues in the 1960s helped split partisan loyalties, which, in turn, led to a dramatic rise in the number of self-identified independents. With parties unable to mobilize this large group of voters to support them consistently, ticket-splitting increased and turnout fell.
AT THE SAME TIME new social issues were arising, the parties were losing their ability to control the nominating process. Following the bitter 1968 campaign for the Democratic party presidential nomination, the process was “reformed” and, ultimately, transformed for both parties. The so-called Reform Democrats of the late sixties and early seventies took the selection process from the hands of party regulars–who were committed to winning elections and safeguarding the party’s future viability–and placed it in the hands of “the people,” who are asked to select candidates in statewide primaries. Such primaries lack both the cues that would make voters’ choices intelligible and the means to hold the winners accountable for their campaign promises.
With voter turnout in primary campaigns dramatically lower than in general elections, power has shifted to a new set of elites: campaign consultants, journalists, and issue advocates. This, in turn, has accelerated the public’s loss of interest. The reforms that began in the late sixties have also resulted in an increasingly lengthened campaign season, which, as the Voter Project’s study indicates, has diminished the interest of average citizens in the campaign itself.
The 1960s also brought about the notion that the media’s responsibility was not so much to report the news as to interpret it. Patterson dates much of this to the advent of evening news programs, when reporters were told, in the words of one of the original producers at NBC, that each story should display the attributes “of fiction, of drama.” Vietnam and Watergate set the stage for the media’s perpetual cynicism. (Patterson cites an example: Peter Jennings described the 1996 GOP nominating campaign as having “enough mud tossed around to keep a health spa supplied for a lifetime.” But in fact, a study by media analyst Robert Lichter found that over half of the ads and two-thirds of stump speeches in that campaign had a positive tone.)
In addition to the declining role of parties, lengthy campaigns, and cynical reporting, Patterson points to more tangible factors that reduce voter participation, and advocates possible reforms, such as more relaxed registration requirements, election holidays, and extended polling hours. But he concedes that voter decline has coincided with the 1993 Motor Voter Act and with loosened restrictions in state registration systems, though it’s possible they have helped stem further decline.
Patterson also considers the impact of two systemic factors, namely, the Electoral College (which suppresses turnout in non-competitive states), and the frequency of U.S. elections compared with other democracies. Although his focus is on presidential elections, he could easily have added the decline in the number of competitive congressional districts engineered by incumbents to protect their seats, which has undoubtedly suppressed voter turnout in non-presidential years.
MATTHEW CRENSON and Benjamin Ginsberg, both of Johns Hopkins University, also link the drop in voter turnout (which they dub “elections without voters”) to the decline of political parties and the reforms that helped bring about that decline. In “Downsizing Democracy,” they argue that since the late 1960s the parties have been captured by advocacy groups whose interest is not in mobilizing mass support but rather in achieving their ideological objectives through the courts and the federal bureaucracy:
Having established their political influence in the absence of comprehensive electoral mobilization, the liberal heirs of the New Politics were understandably reluctant to place it at risk by issuing appeals for mass activism. They were likely to flourish politically in a low-turnout environment.
The authors are no less critical of conservatives, whom they accuse of imitating the public-interest-group model pioneered by liberals and doing “little or nothing in the 1980s and 1990s to bring new voters into the electorate.” (They contend–without offering any documentation–that the Republican party’s new constituencies, including the Christian right, were already involved in the process.)
Declining electoral participation is but one manifestation of a much larger problem Crenson and Ginsberg have identified for American democracy: namely, the lack of interest among political elites in drawing ordinary citizens into democracy’s workings. Over the past century, citizens have been relegated from their multiple public roles as soldiers, bondholders, and administrators to more passive consumers of government services. In the process, they have been marginalized politically even as the competition among elites has increased (as reflected in enhanced levels of partisan conflict and the growing number of organizations represented in Washington). To Crenson and Ginsberg, the nation’s leaders themselves are responsible for the overall decline in political consciousness and civic participation:
Citizens become politically engaged because states and political elites need them and mobilize them. If citizens remain passive, politically indifferent, or preoccupied with private concerns, the reason may be that our political order no longer provides incentives for collective participation in politics.
Vanishing voters, downsized democracy–just how much trouble are we in? In one of the early studies of American voting behavior in the 1950s, a group of political scientists scandalized their profession by noting the value of apathy. They argued that it reflected broad satisfaction with the status quo and served to keep in check an excessive number of demands that might cripple the government’s ability to function effectively.
Whatever the merits of that particular argument, it is certainly true that a relatively undemanding public, preoccupied with the everyday concerns of work, family, and community, is far superior to its antithesis, where politics is so all-consuming and the stakes are so high that the losing side is prepared to take to the streets. It is telling that the authors of both of these books disparage the passivity with which Americans and their leaders accepted the Supreme Court decision that ended the 2000 election. In the words of Crenson and Ginsberg, “neither candidate sought to mobilize public support during the post-election battle in Florida.” But would mass demonstrations, as advocated by Jesse Jackson and others, really have been a sign of democratic health?
As Patterson’s example of the Electoral College makes clear, Americans, practical to a fault, will not turn out in substantial numbers to vote when it is unlikely that their vote will materially affect the outcome. While we can all deplore the lack of civic-mindedness that low voter turnout partially reflects, it is hardly a threat to the well-being of the republic. Furthermore, with so many critical issues taken off the electoral table and turned over to unelected bureaucrats and judges (a process Crenson and Ginsberg detail in one of the more interesting parts of “Downsizing Democracy”), is it any wonder it has become more difficult to mobilize the electorate?
Is further decline inevitable? The authors of these books believe it is. On the one hand, tinkering at the margins with such reforms as election holidays and later poll closings, as Patterson advocates, is unlikely to stem the tide. But surely September 11 revived at least the possibility that a “post-post-industrial” politics can emerge–one that realigns the political parties around issues related to domestic security and civil liberties and that energizes the electorate. If so, perhaps the “vanishing voter” will yet return.
David Lowe is the vice president for government and external relations at the National Endowment for Democracy.
