What’s wrong with this picture?
Well, it turns out that voter turn-out is not in decline at all. In fact, a new study says the idea that voters are increasingly apathetic is a myth. Did this news explode across the front page? Shake foundations to their foundation? Not exactly.
In December, two political scientists, Michael P. McDonald of the University of Illinois, Springfield, and Samuel Popkin of the University of California, San Diego published a landmark article in the American Political Science Review entitled “The Myth of the Vanishing Voter.” Like so much academic work, it received scant attention. The story of their story says as much about the state of political science as it does about American voters.
Until now, the assumption has been that voter participation is down about 10 percent in the last three decades and sinking. In 1996, we were told by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate that the numbers of eligible voters dipped below 50 percent (48.9) for the first time in a presidential election year (off-year participation is routinely about 36 to 38 percent), an ominous sign that Americans were taking their sacred right to vote for granted. In the hotly contested 2000 election, the numbers rebounded only slightly to 51.2 percent of eligible voters.
But McDonald and Popkin point out that those numbers are not based on truly eligible voters but on voting-age population (VAP) figures taken from the U.S. Census, and that such numbers are deeply flawed. They include felons and foreign nationals who are of voting age and living in the United States but who are ineligible to vote. This greatly skews the numbers, especially in big states with lots of felons and immigrants. The percentage of non-citizens who are of voting age increased from 2 percent of the population in 1966 to 8 percent in 2000.
And the VAP excludes Americans living abroad, who vote in high numbers by absentee ballot. In other words, political scientists have for years been bemoaning declining participation when in fact many of those stay-at-home voters simply weren’t eligible. And some who were eligible–and do vote–weren’t counted. Sounds a lot like Florida, 2000.
Through a time-consuming process that involved counting felons and immigrants state-by-state, McDonald and Popkin arrived at a much more realistic standard called the voting-eligible-population (VEP). The percentage of eligible voters who went to the polls by this count was consistently about four points higher (55.6 percent in 2000) than in the standard count.
Moreover, by this measure, there has been no significant decline in national turnout since 1972 and in the South (thanks to the Civil Rights revolution) it is up considerably. All told, participation is in the 54 to 57 percent range and remarkably stable. “Turnout is lower [than it was in the 1950s] but there is no ‘downward trend,’” the authors write. In fact, the 1950s were an aberration, and overall voter turnout is about where it has been for most of the 20th Century.
But isn’t turnout in American elections still low compared to the rest of the world? Yes, but McDonald and Popkin say that comparing our system to a parliamentary one is misleading. Most parliamentary systems place much higher stakes on national elections, where parties with clearly defined agendas square-off. In federal systems like ours, with state elections, the stakes are diffused. Switzerland and Japan, which have comparably low turnouts, also have federal systems.
Obviously, the United States can do better than 55 percent turnout in presidential elections. Civic engagement remains a problem, especially among the young. Turnout in local elections is especially pathetic, with school board elections sometimes determined by 10 percent of the electorate.
But Americans don’t go “Bowling Alone” (the title of Robert Putnam famous essay on community participation) and they aren’t abandoning the ballot box en masse when it’s time to select a president. We’re about as committed–or apathetic–as our grandparents were.
