The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty
by Thomas Patterson
Knopf, 256 pp., $25
We all know that Americans don’t vote — 51% turnout, what we saw for Bush-Gore in 2000, is about as good as we get, and in most elections (like the one on Tuesday, and certainly in Austin local races), we settle for far less. Last we checked, the U.S. ranked 114th in electoral participation among the world’s voting nations, below Iran, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan.
But nobody really knows why we don’t vote. Since 1960 — with 63% turnout, the high-water mark since World War II — the American electorate has increased its education and wealth; formal and informal barriers to voting by minorities, women, and the poor have been lowered; voter registration has been greatly simplified; and election information consumes untold pages of print and minutes of airtime. Decades ago, experts thought that turnout by 2000 would rise to 80%. The opposite happened; turnout is now at pre-Civil-War levels, when barely literate farmers traveled miles on foot to reach their polls. Why is this so?
Harvard political scientist Thomas Patterson, with funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts, sought the answer with 2000’s Vanishing Voter Project, of which this book is the fruit. It’s a shame that Patterson’s year of labor and 100,000 citizen interviews weren’t enough to find that answer — or, perhaps, to verify it, because Patterson has assumed certain truths to be self-evident. On the second page of The Vanishing Voter, Patterson writes: “Today’s elections are unmistakably top-down affairs, conducted in ways that suit candidates, journalists, and officials. The gap between [them] and the citizen — despite the intimacy of television and the immediacy of polling — has never been greater. … The juice has been squeezed out of elections.”
This is conventional wisdom, not too removed from the thesis of Patterson’s previous book, Out of Order — whose subtitle, “How the Decline of the Political Parties and the Growing Power of the News Media Undermine the American Way of Electing Presidents,” tells you all you need to know. The Vanishing Voter Project gave Patterson a unique opportunity to empiricize this academic belief, but without much bang. Much attention is paid to the usual suspects — the banal, craven, poll-driven campaigns; the negative, cynical, trust-destroying tone of the media; the inequities of the U.S. system, where only certain people in certain states at certain times have real influence. All these things matter, according to Patterson’s research, yet none is decisive. (As an aside, we might note, as Patterson does not, that turnout in most Western democracies has been sliding since 1980; while many nations’ politics are becoming more Americanized, they are still much less riven by Patterson’s cited sins.)
The prevailing tenor of the Vanishing Voter Project findings is much simpler: People are bored and confused by politics and don’t care who wins. That’s bad news for a political scientist, but Patterson’s book is most valuable when he foregoes wringing his hands for working the problem. The election season is too long. How can we shorten it? Political news is too filtered and distorted by sound bites and media pundits. What’s the alternative? Small blocs of voters in key states have too much power. How do we equalize that power? Patterson’s discussions of such wonkish questions produce insights that exceed the bulk of the book in freshness.
But The Vanishing Voter‘s innate shortfall is one commonly found in learned explorations of the media and of politics — a too-narrow frame of reference. Why do more people vote for president than for city council? Why do more people vote in Boston than in Austin? Why do more people vote in Lesotho than in the United States? If you want to know how elections really affect (and effect) civic life, and in turn human lives, these questions matter, and probably matter more than “Why don’t people vote the way they used to when I was a kid?” (Patterson’s book, of course, begins with recollections of when he was a kid, in the Fifties.)
To answer them, one must go where Patterson does not — beyond a twice-told (at least) inside-the-Beltway, inside-the-Ivy-League narrative of U.S. presidential politics (the only level of public life seemingly worthy of a Harvard professor’s time) and their sad decline from a putative Golden Age. Yes, once the primaries and conventions mattered and the pols spoke in complete sentences and the media was heroic and it was all so exciting. But that nostalgia animates Patterson more than the realities of today and tomorrow, and more than anything his project actually found. Or, perhaps, than it sought.
This article appears in November 8 • 2002.