Understanding Voter Participation

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 2.3

Note: This and several of the next batch of posts from PART I of the book will largely focus on the example of the United States. For my international readers, be assured that PARTS II and III of the book will have universal relevance.

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Americans are of two minds when it comes to our electoral “democracy.” Most Americans don’t really like politics, and don’t trust politicians. At the same time, ironically, we hoped that our democracy could provide inspiration for democratic transformations around the world, whether in Tienanmen Square in Beijing, or Tahrir Square in Cairo. Many Americans seem to accept as an article of faith that American democracy is the best in the world. To believe otherwise would simply be “unpatriotic.” Based on countless objective outcome and process measures, however, this belief is unfounded. 

A “democracy barometer” was developed by researchers from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the Social Science Research Center in Berlin, Germany in 2010. They used 100 empirical indicators seeking to evaluate such things as government transparency, rule of law, freedom, equality, government effectiveness, etc., comparing 30 advanced industrialized democracies. The United States fell in the middle range, ranking 11th, behind Canada and various European nations, including all of those in Scandinavia. The researchers’ selection and weighting of criteria is of course open to question, though it should be noted that the home nations of the researchers received slightly lower rankings than the United States. In 2014 a far more ambitious data collection project was started. The Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), involving over 3,500 experts in 180 countries, has collected data on 450 indicators annually, going back to 1789, all the way up to to the present, for all countries of the world. In their 2022 report, the United States ranked 23rd among electoral democracies, and had dropped significantly over the preceding decade.

Let’s take a closer look at one metric. Voter turnout is sometimes used as a crude indicator of citizens’ engagement in their democracy. It is typical for U.S. journalists to report on the percentage of registered voters who turn up at the polls. However, the most appropriate measure for international comparisons is the turnout percentage of the voting age population (including disqualified and unregistered adults). This is because eligibility and registration rules vary from country to country. In the U.S., for example, many states disqualified current or former felons, which disenfranchises around 5 million Americans. This is more than the total number of adults living in the six states of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming combined, including an astonishing 13 percent of all African American males of voting age. In 2018 Florida voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment eliminating felony disenfranchisement in that state. However, the elected government adopted new laws creating special requirements and the threat of arrest for former felons who registered to vote if old criminal financial obligations were still outstanding. Various organizations such as the NAACP, ACLU, League of Women Voters, and the Brennan Center sued to have this “pay-to-vote system” overturned. As of this writing, the re-enfranchisement efforts are still in court.

Unlike most developed democracies, the United States also has a sizable portion of citizens who are eligible but not registered to vote. The U.S. is nearly alone in placing the burden of voter registration on the individual voter, rather than making it a governmental responsibility. In most developed democracies, the government maintains and constantly updates a universal voter registration list. In the U.S., however, approximately 30 percent of the voting age population is unregistered. While this figure includes ineligible individuals, such as those convicted of felonies, and non-citizens, most unregistered adults are those who would be eligible to vote if registered. Since media coverage of voter turnout in the U.S. frequently reports turnout as a percentage of the reduced pool of residents who happen to be registered, this creates a false impression of greater participation in the voting process than actually exists.

Voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections, typically America’s highest turnout elections, was on a downward trend through the second half of the twentieth century. It eventually fell to below half of the voting age population in 1996. Turnout saw a modest rebound and reached 57 percent in 2008. The increase in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected, over 2004 can be completely attributed to the increase in turnout among minority voters. The turnout percentage among whites actually declined in 2008. Overall turnout went back down again in 2012 and recovered slightly in 2016. The intense emotions (some enthusiasm, but more fear and anxiety) prompted by the Trump/Biden contest of 2020 resulted in an unusual spike in voter turnout. 

Despite these variations, the United States still ranks near the bottom internationally for voter turnout. The United States is 73rd among the world’s nations that hold presidential elections – behind Uganda and Romania, according to voting-age turnout data compiled by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. In off-year Congressional elections, when turnout is far worse, close to two-thirds of America’s voting age population typically stays home, giving the U.S. a ranking of 165^th in the world – just behind Burkina Faso and Pakistan. The percentage turnout in American municipal elections frequently dips into the single digits.

In sum, most Americans do not vote in most elections. It should be noted, however, that high voter participation is certainly not proof of a vibrant democracy either. One-party dictatorships frequently hold ‘elections’ with astronomical turnouts being reported.

The peak of participation by eligible American voters came in the late nineteenth century (prior to female suffrage), and was widely credited to the system of political patronage in which election winners doled out jobs and favors to their supporters. Federal civil service reform through the Pendleton Act of 1883, and various state reforms that limited political spoils, contributed to a decline in turnout. Participation rates among eligible voters generally declined through the 20th century. The Vanishing Voter Project of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government conducted thousands of weekly interviews during the 2000 elections, seeking to understand the low voter turnout in the United States. Harvard professor Thomas Patterson analyzed this data in his book The Vanishing Voter. While recommending numerous reforms that could increase voter participation, he found that there was a basic motivational problem. He notes that

“Personal ambition now drives campaigns, and profit and celebrity now drive journalism. Candidates, public officials, and journalists operate in a narrow professional world that is largely of their own making and that is remote from the world of the public they serve.”

Patterson concludes that the two-party system of media and candidate aggrandizement in the U.S. “has very little power to move voters in the sense of giving them compelling reasons to participate.” 

Rates of participation are also correlated with income. There is an undeniable class aspect to mass participation that further depreciates those of lesser means. More than mere lack of time and access, they also face psychological barriers.  As Phil Parvin of Loughborough University argues in a 2017 paper:

“individuals of low socio-economic status do not identify as citizens (in anything other than a purely legal sense) or participate as such. What participation they do engage in is largely uncoordinated and ineffective.”

Voting is not the only aspect of political engagement that has declined. Partisan loyalty and activity have also diminished. Partisan citizens have historically been more likely to vote and participate in other civic activities. The number of “independents” has grown over the years, and depending on how one defines the term, estimates are that they now make up around 40 percent of the United States population. Ever since the followers of Thomas Jefferson began organizing large groups of voters into a party in opposition to the Federalists, parties and partisanship have been a dominant feature of American politics. At various times and places, party “machines” engaged large numbers of citizens in some sort of politics. While large numbers of citizens were engaged, it is debatable how “democratic” this was. Machine politics was often corrupt and had more to do with patronage jobs than policy. But the era of “the machine” has significantly abated (except in certain places). 

Collective political activity of all sorts has been in decline for decades. In their book Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public, Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg make the argument that mass mobilization of citizens through politics (whether voting or street demonstrations) has been giving way to special interest professionalism, and the management of mailing lists (and today, email lists and social media). They argue that a heavy reliance on lawyers for litigation, lobbying of regulatory agencies and legislators, etc. has reduced the role of average citizens to symbolic supporters of online petitions, or sources of funding for these professionally-run interest groups. Some citizens still comment from the sidelines through blogs and letters to the editor, but real politics is the realm of professionals. Citizens are essentially encouraged to contribute money, cheer or jeer the activities of the professionals, but otherwise keep out of the way.

There are many reasons why, compared to most developed democracies, voter participation is so stunningly low in the United States. Some of these factors, such as the fact that most other electoral governments use proportional representation, will be explored in subsequent chapters. However, it should be noted that the downward trend in voter turnout is occurring across the world. An article in The Economist magazine in 2014 entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy” reported that voter turnout is falling generally, and that “a study of 49 democracies found that it had declined by 10 percentage points between 1980-84 and [again between] 2007-13…. What’s more, with few exceptions, membership in political parties in developed democracies has also been declining for decades. In Britain membership in any political party dropped from 20 percent in 1950 to around 8 percent by 1970 and just 1 percent today.” Low voter participation is a symptom of a much bigger problem, and the solution is not to simply drag more people to the polls. 

A good summary of the benefits of randomly selected mini-publics, even merely as a modest augmentation, is offered by Parvin:

“Strategies which seek to incorporate the perspectives of small groups of citizens into the traditionally configured institutions of representative democracy may serve to open up the decision-making process to the views of all citizens and, hence, serve to break up the structural asymmetries in influence which emerge as a consequence of too heavy a reliance on widespread, society-wide participation. They also offer a possible solution to the lack of political knowledge among marginalized citizens by providing opportunities for reflective deliberation and knowledge gathering in controlled environments: inviting small groups of citizens to reflect collectively on issues, providing these citizens with the relevant facts on which to reflect, and then incorporating the resulting insights either formally or informally into the decision-making process may go some way to plugging the epistemic gaps which characterize contemporary mass societies, improve decision-making, and provide a real voice for citizens who have been genuinely empowered to know and defend their own interests.”

Voting as the primary form of participation can be described as “feeble,” and does not manifest the essential civic character of democracy. Democracy requires the sense of a society-wide common project, using give and take to forge a path for the community as a whole, which includes the needs of the minorities within it. Participation confined to voting and election campaigns is more akin to a mobilization of a symbolic volunteer army to defeat or even destroy the “other side.”