Note: This essay was written in 1999, as I looked back at a political trend prevailing in the United States at the end of the century, with some comparative glances at contemporary trends in western Europe.

 

The United States and the Western European countries share the same political regime, commercial republicanism, as well as the practice of more or less universal suffrage for adult citizens. But United States voter participation has declined from the high levels of one hundred years ago, whereas European voter participation is high. Further, U. S. voting rates have declined recently, both in the decade of the 1990s and in the previous three decades.

To take the recent numbers first: In the national midterm elections in the period 1962-1970, Americans voted at rates ranging from just under 47% to 48.6%. By contrast, in the period 1986-1998, percentages have ranged from a high of 38.8% in 1994—the year of the ‘Gingrich Revolution,’ in which annoyed voters overthrew a longstanding Democratic-Party majority in the House of Representatives—to a low of 36.1% in 1998.

In western Europe in the 1960s, some countries saw voter turnouts nearing 90% (Burnham 82-83). The European turnouts in the 1990s are also noticeably higher, for the most part, in the United States.

The numbers in presidential elections have been higher, but parallel. In 1996, 49% of voting-eligible citizens voted, down from 63% in 1960. Admittedly, the result of the 1996 election was a foregone conclusion, in sharp contrast to the heavily contested 1960 race. With the advent of fairly reliable scientific polling, many people may not bother to go to the polls when the decision seems already to have been made; if one prefers Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, and one expects Clinton to win easily, why not let my fellow citizens be the good soldiers and troop off to the polls? Nothing crazy is likely to happen, and one saves time and effort by staying home.

Except that the trend prevails across elections. Turnout has declined despite the effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, with provisions such as ‘motor voter,’ which make registration easier. Although Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward argued some years ago that voter registration in the U. S. is too difficult, that European governments are obligated to register voter, that two-thirds of unregistered citizens in American are below the median household income, leading to underrepresentation of those who depend upon government services most, the rather flaccid response to liberalized procedures can give little encouragement to such reformers. Although economist Stephen J. Knack and others have made brave efforts to put the best face on these results, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that deeper forces are at work than the effects of voter registration rules.

The highest turnout in the 1998 elections occurred in Minnesota, where the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura captured the imaginations of his fellow citizens, as he had so often done in his previous career. Unless we are to empty the ranks of the World Wrestling Federation—that Jeffersonian breeding ground for the natural aristoi of virtue and talent—in the quest for revivified civic consciousness, it is difficult to see how to proceed.

Several dubious arguments have been advanced to explain the ‘secular’ or century-long trend as well as the shorter-term trend. Theodore J. Lowi blames not one aspect of the legal system, the registration rules, but the system itself. “Modern law has become a series of instructions to administrators rather than a series of commands to citizens…. The citizen has become an administre, and the question now is how to be certain he remains a citizen” (Lowi 144). Sentences worthy of a latter-day Tocqueville, perhaps, but are not the Europeans more ‘administered’ than we, their states more extensive, bureaucratic, and intrusive? Could it be that there is something to the fact that Americans were first democratized, then bureaucratized, whereas in much of Europe the reverse was the case” Lowi does not ask, and so does not say.

Thomas B. Edsall observes that top income earners are more likely to vote than those whose family incomes are low (Edsall 179-181). If so, why have voting rates declined in the last two decades, when more Americans have become wealthy than at any other time in our national life? There is, further, less really grinding poverty today than in the 1930s, and probably less than in the nineteenth century. Could there be, then, some correlation between widening income levels and non-participation? Could it be that the increasing numbers of affluent voters are more than counterbalanced by increasing numbers of nonvoters who are less well-off relative to the upper echelons? That might correlate better with existing economic conditions, but Edsall, writing in the early 1980s, does not ask, and so does not say.

Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone cite “the transcendental importance of education” as a factor in voter turnout (102). The more highly educated one is, the greater one’s sense of civic duty, and the greater the social pressure to vote. That may very well be true, but that cannot explain the decline in voting, long-term or short. Americans in the twentieth century are markedly better-educated—or at least educated more extensively—than were their predecessors. And Americans in the past twenty years re no less educated than Americans of the 1960s. Could it be that the content of American education—especially the primary and early secondary education that is universal today—somehow discourages voting in adulthood? Could be: Some more civic-minded version of Allan Bloom might write a jeremiad on the subject. But Wolfinger and Rosenstone do not ask, and so cannot say.

Wolfinger and Rosenstone also notice that farmers, being more dependent upon government policies than most groups, tend to vote more. The decline of the farm population might then be a factor in the century-long trend. But poor, urban blacks and Latinos also feel the impact of government policies more than most groups, and their voting rates are low. Sheer dependency upon government services cannot be the main factor. After all, in this century nearly all Americans have become increasingly affected by, if not dependent upon, government regulations. surely we should all be voting early and often, but we are not.

No monocausal socioeconomic factor seems decisive. A social scientist might devise a complex formula that would measure the weights and interrelations of these trends. I am not that political scientist, and so must leave such projects to the adepts.

Retreating to that sanctuary of the mathematically impaired, political history, I shall explain the decline of voting in America and contrast the American circumstance with that of Europe, writing in terms merely plausible, rather than mathematical and demonstrative. The esprit de finesse may be less impressive than the esprit de géométrie, but perforce I must go with the former.

Historians mark the beginning of the decline of voting at 1896, when 80% of eligible voters (i.e., adult, mostly white, males) voted (Chambers 14). Voting correlates with strong party identification; post-1896, party identification weakened (Burnham 120, 133; Campbell et al., chapters 6 and 7). The year 1896 was one of America’s so-called critical elections, that is, an election in which a significant and long-term political alignment occurred. This particular realignment had effects that caused voter turnout decline. Why might one think so?

John Agnew’s concept of ‘core and periphery’ can be and has been usefully brought into play here. Agnew argues that the socioeconomic ‘core’ of the United States—the centers of commerce and manufacturing—has long been politically at odds with the ‘periphery’—the agrarian hinterlands. It must be admitted, of course, that the ‘core’ started out as a fairly puny area—a network of dots along the eastern seaboard. Nonetheless, by 1787 the ‘core’ was sufficiently influential to get the new, commercial-republican constitution ratified; a century later, the ‘core’ could be said to occupy most of a whole region, the northeast. In the 1896 election, the socioeconomic core and periphery were matched up, for the first time since the days before the Civil War, with the party political system. The Northeast became solidly Republican, the South solidly Democratic, with the West siding with the North. This had been true of antebellum America, but this time the impassionating issue of slavery was gone; division did not lead to disunion but to political stability, both within the key regions. Republicans were safe in the Northeast, Democrats safe in the Southeast) and nationally. Republican majorities rested largely undisturbed, except by the anomalous Wilson, beneficiary of a Republican split, until 1932.

An important dimension of this episode was described by Peter H. Argersinger in his 1980 article, “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” Fusion (the support of one set of candidates by more than one party) gave party competition added juice. In the West, Republicans had a plurality but not a majority of the votes in many states. Democrats could counter by pooling votes on a fusion ticket with, for example, the Greenback Party or some other populist organization. Obviously, in the West this gave Republicans a strong motive to get rid of fusion balloting and replace it with the blanket ballot or ‘Australian’ system. Republicans succeeded in this campaign by invoking an anti-corruption argument; that paved the way to 1896 (Argersinger 287-306).

The new settlement enabled Southern Democrats to put the finishing touches on their post-Reconstruction program of disenfranchising blacks and poor whites. These groups were electorally unnecessary and both politically useful to suppress, as Jack Bloom explains.

In the North, the new stability eventually made political bosses, always a bit unsavory to respectable, middle-class sorts, less salient, as well. Although initially more secure in the new alignment, bosses lost in the long term. Less competition yielded less urgent need for political mobilization. Reformers, including business interests, could not push confidently for professionalized government, the end of the patronage system, of ‘corruption.’ But the end of patronage meant that a major incentive to vote, namely, the desire for an indoor job with no heavy lifting, disappeared. If I can get a government job by passing a test instead of voting and getting others out to vote, I will sharpen my pencil and stay at home. Progressives supposed that a new system of primary elections, initiative and referendum, and similar devices would keep participation rates high. They were mistaken. Civil service reform meant that the basic infrastructure of government would remain, whatever party was in power. Absent some major crisis, why vote?

By 1912, less than 59% of eligible citizens voted. The crisis of the Depression brought turnouts into the low 60s for a time (still far less than the rate in the 1890s); in 1952 and 1960—both elections about the future of the New Deal-type government the Depression brought on—the numbers got into the low 60s again. But for the most part, numbers dwindled.

By the 1950s the “quasi-military drill” of nineteenth-century American politics was long gone (Chambers 15), replaced by media-centric advertising, which further diminished the strength of the parties (Sorauf, in Chambers, 54-55). Motivated by the invigorating thumotic passions attendant to peer pressure (no ‘Australian ballots’ in the nineteenth century until 1892—your neighbors knew how you voted) and by the less invigorating but no less compelling motive of job-seeking, political soldiers had been displaced by consumer-spectators, motivated by images and sounds—less compelling devices, as any experienced preacher, or salesman, will tell you.

The American circumstance can be contrasted with the European. In America, bureaucratization took a lot of the fun, and some of the point, out of democratic politics. In Europe, bureaucracy already existed. Democratic-republican politics, hard-won during violent revolutions in the nineteenth century and world wars in the twentieth, took on a much more earnest character than it did in twentieth-century America, where the fight for voting rights (except for the suffragist and the civil rights movements) was fought overseas, in trenches and not in ballot booths.

Angus Campbell and his colleagues remark that Americans are not so ‘ideological’ as Europeans, and not so strongly partisan. European political parties still recall regime politics—forgotten in the United States since the 1860s—and still galvanize political passions. Sharper class struggles are tied to regime politics; for decades in Europe (certainly up to the time of Mitterand’s France, which changed expectations by doing so little) a socialist party victory might be seen as the capture of the state apparatus by ‘the workers,’ a new politeuma or ruling body. Not so, the New Deal, or at least not so obviously. This is reinforced by the fact that in Europe the state itself is regarded as sovereign, not the people, as in America. By reason of history, by reason of the socioeconomic character of the parties, and by reason of the structure of sovereignty itself, Europeans are less likely to be altogether more earnest and conscientious about voting than their lackadaisical New-World allies (cf. Lowi in Chambers 240-241).

Unlike the president-oriented twentieth-century American republics, European republics tend to be parliament-centered (McCormick in Chambers 104). The function of parliamentarism is similar to that of local patronage networks in nineteenth-century America. Parliamentarism reinforces localism, and therefore peer pressure, even with ‘Australian’ ballots. Thus the European republics, which appear heavily nationalized, actually have rather strong local roots. Steady, day-to-day ruling goes on, with a strong connection between local communities and the large, patronage-dispensing bureaucratized state apparatuses.

What of the shorter-term, post-1970 decline? With the sociopolitical infrastructure of American politics replaced by media-driven entertainment packages, about which voters are increasingly sophisticated and therefore skeptical, it is no wonder that increased levels of education have coexisted with increased non-participation. Jesse Ventura is right: If it takes a high school education to make a fan see that pro wrestling is fake, then the way to the hearts of an educated electorate is to do what the World Wrestling Federation did, starting in the 1980s: Admit that the performers are faking it, let the public in on the act, wink at the camera in your campaign commercials. This, however, isn’t likely to be a very long-lasting ‘fix.’ Absent some way to tie national political campaigns and daily governance to local and family concerns—other in the abstract, emptily rhetorical way of proclaiming ‘The Year of the Child,’ ‘The Year of the Woman,’ the Year of the This or the Year of the That—there will be no cure for mediocre turnouts.

 

Works Cited

Agnew, John: The United States in the World Economy: A Regional Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Argersinger, Peter H.: “Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws.” American Historical Review, LXXV (1980) 287-306.

Bloom, Jack: Class, Race and the Civil Rights Movement. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Burnham, Walter Dean: Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970.

Campbell, Angus, et al.: The American Voter. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet: “Party Development and the American Mainstream.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1960.

Chambers, William Nisbet, and Burnham, Walter Dean, eds.: The American Party Systems: Stages in Political Development. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Edsall, Thomas B.: Power and Money: Writings on Politics, 1971-1987. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.

Knack, Steven J.: “Does Motor Voter Work? An Analysis of State-Level Data.” Journal of Politics 57 (3) (August 1993) 796-811.

Lowi, Theodore J.: “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

McCormick, Richard P.: “Political Development and the Second Party System.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.,

Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Why Americans Don’t Vote. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Sorauf, Frank J.: “Political Parties and Political Analysis.” In Chambers and Burnham, 1970.

Wolfinger, Raymond E. and Rosenstone, Steven J.: Who Votes? New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.