The Vanishing Voter: A Blessing in Disguise?
BY MATTHEW WEINSHALL |
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The framers of the U.S. Constitution were concerned
that citizens would vote too much and too impulsively,
as they had done under the Articles of Confederation.
So they established institutions that curtailed complete
popular sovereignty, including the electoral college and
the Senate.
Nowadays, however, rather than worry about the
tyranny of the majority, scholars of politics tend to
denounce the political passivity of the majority. To these
scholars, the steadily declining voter turnout rate is an
alarming trend that must be reversed.
Thomas Patterson’s The Vanishing Voter exemplifies
this modern scholarly anxiety. Citing data from his
“Vanishing Voter Project” at Harvard’s Shorenstein
Center, which surveyed citizens during the 2000 presidential
campaign, Patterson concludes that the structure
of the electoral system is most at fault for record low levels
of voter turnout and voter knowledge of key campaign
issues. He believes that as a result of the advent of the television
news media and increasing social complexity, the
electoral system has evolved in the last 50 years away
from the needs of the voters. Because the electoral system
does not engage them enough, and often repulses
them, many citizens spend very little time talking, thinking
or learning about politics.
According to Patterson, whose discussion focuses on
presidential campaigns, some modern developments that
make politics so unattractive and discouraging are the
increasing skepticism and interpretive style of the news
media and the lengthening of the campaign season.
Although most accounts of the news media’s antagonistic
relationship with politicians begin with Watergate and
the Vietnam War, Patterson traces it back to the introduction
of the thirty-minute nightly newscast in 1963. To
make their programs more entertaining, newscasters
began to practice explanatory or interpretive journalism,
where they would weigh the importance of events and
analyze their causes, rather than merely describe them.
This practice then spread to print journalism and intensified.
Patterson argues that journalists, instead of the
events that they were reporting, became the center of the
news; analysis and opinions replaced sound bites and
direct quotes. This development, in conjunction with the
skepticism toward government authority that Vietnam
and Watergate produced, infused political news with an
extremely negative tone. Patterson argues that this negative
tone breeds mistrust of politicians among members
of the public and thus causes them to participate less.
To combat this trend, Patterson proposes that network
stations be required to dedicate more prime-time
coverage to live campaign events, such as the party
conventions, primary debates, and hour-long interviews
with the leading candidates. But he acknowledges that
while these recommendations would make direct,
unmediated political information more available to the
public, unless the members of the public suddenly
became more interested in politics, it is unlikely that
they would pay attention to the information.
This is why Patterson recommends changing the nomination
system so that it appeals to voters by featuring
more drama and spectacle. His Vanishing Voter surveys
find that people tend to pay more attention to politics,
and become more involved in it, during dramatic periods,
such as the major party conventions and presidential
debates. Patterson argues, though, that the excessive
length of the current primary system has drained much of
the excitement from these special events. By the time of
the conventions, or even the later primaries, the major
parties have already chosen their candidates, rendering
those events meaningless. Patterson believes that shortening
the nomination system by scheduling a few single
state primaries only a few months before the summer
conventions, and then holding an “Ultimate Tuesday” primary
for the remaining states just before the conventions,
would sufficiently increase the drama.
Patterson makes a compelling case that these changes,
in addition to others like making election day a national
holiday and permitting election-day registration, would
increase voter turnout. But he fails to prove that a higher
turnout rate is a desirable thing.
Patterson is not alone in making this mistake; much of
the empirical work on voting behavior takes it for granted
that more participation is always better than less. This
assumption, however, ignores the implications of perhaps
the most consistent and well-established finding in
voter survey research: those who do not vote tend to
know almost nothing about politics. In fact, while most
of those who do vote are more politically knowledgeable
than those who don’t, they still lack enough information
to cast an adequately informed vote. For instance,
Patterson finds that just before the 2000 presidential
election, a majority of voters could identify only one of
each candidate’s policy positions.
Of course, Patterson believes that his recommendations
will produce a well-informed electorate. But an
accurate understanding of his “benchmark” for a wellfunctioning
electorate — the electorates of the 1950s
and 1960s — reveals the intractability of the public’s
political ignorance. Patterson portrays the 1950s and
1960s as a period of intense and widespread partisanship
in which people were divided over grand philosophical
issues, such as the government’s proper role in
regulating the economy, and aligned themselves with
the political party that adopted their positions. But this
portrayal of the fifties, at least, overlooks one of the
most influential works of that period on voting behavior,
Phillip Converse’s “The Nature of Belief Systems in
Mass Publics.”
Converse found that very few voters in 1954 understood
the ideological differences or even the substantive
policy positions of the two major parties; rather, most of
those who affiliated themselves with particular parties
did so due to an oversimplified understanding of the
groups that the party supported, or of the party’s position
on a particular issue. And the majority of voters could not
even reasonably be affiliated with either of the parties.
Converse’s conclusion, that “large portions of an electorate
do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that
have formed the basis for intense political controversy
among elites for substantial periods of time,” has been
consistently confirmed by modern survey research.
Patterson partly blames the public’s political ignorance
on the recent emergence of “interest group politics.”
Because politicians now cater to small pockets of
the electorate by making campaign promises on narrowly
tailored issues rather than taking positions on broad,
overarching ideas, the majority of the uninformed can no
longer rely on political parties as a proxy for a particular
candidate’s policy positions. While it makes sense to
note, as Patterson does, that the increasing complexity of
politics (and the world in general) reduces the utility of
political parties, he does not recognize that the broad,
overarching ideas he craves are meaningful only to people
who are politically sophisticated enough that, like
Patterson himself, they can and will assimilate political
ideologies. But since most voters did not understand politics
when reliable “rules of thumb” like political parties
were available, how can Patterson expect the public to
become better informed now in an even more complex
and challenging environment?
If widespread political ignorance cannot be reduced, it
is perhaps counterproductive to encourage more people
to vote more unless democracy is an end in itself, regardless
of how well or poorly democratic decisions are made
or how harmful popularly chosen policies are.
Allowing the politically sophisticated elite to control
the government, however, as Patterson recognizes, may
be worse. While the political elite tend to be relatively
better informed, Converse found that their beliefs also
tend to be more dogmatic because they are more ideological.
Patterson similarly finds that the most active
voters are also the most rigidly partisan, even though the
complexity and independence of most political issues
render the partisan bundling of issues illogical. An ideology
or a partisan affiliation, as Converse puts it, “constrains”
the ideologue’s or partisan’s thought processes;
it predetermines those beliefs that are acceptable and
those that are not. Hence those who are innocent of ideologies
— that is, most of the public — possess belief
systems that are more flexible and eccentric, even while
they are much less well informed than the ideological
and partisan elite.
Relying on a broad ideology allows people to form
opinions on a wide range of issues and organize large
amounts of political information. But it can also cause
people to be more close-minded and resistant to worthy
ideas that fall outside of their ideologies. Patterson recognizes
the danger that this latter tendency produces; it
results in extremism, divisiveness, and rancorous
debates, all three of which hinder sound policy making.
Considering the close-mindedness of the political
elite, it may be better to rely on the political decisions
of the uninformed public. Still, this choice does not
entail the unquestioned celebration of popular sovereignty
that plagues Patterson’s study. Rather, acknowledging
the Hobson’s choice between an uninformed
public and a dogmatic elite should cause scholars to
shift their attention away from research like Patterson’s
that only focuses on ways to empower the uninformed,
and toward the question of whether there is any way to
make wise political decisions in a complicated world.
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| Matthew Weinshall is a 2001 graduate of Harvard College. Email him at dissident@the-dissident.com |
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