Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Why Americans Don't Vote
Chapin, Jim
WHY AMERICANS DON'T VOTE, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. 325 pp. $19.95. Panes Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, like many other intellectuals from the...
...Even their success stories show something of the problem...
...If nonvoters in 1980 leaned towards Jimmy Carter, it should be mentioned that at least some of them didn't vote because of their attitudes toward Carter...
...In ethnic Queens, at least, the "missing voters" are not those that would bring comfort to Piven, Cloward, or Jesse Jackson...
...The study then turns to the changes of the fifties and sixties...
...The core electorate is now more liberal than the peripheral electorate, and may be more liberal than the potential electorate...
...The voters that stayed home, as far as can be determined, were "backlash" conservative ethnics who voted against John Lindsay and for Richard Nixon...
...After 1964, Democrats had to back black voting in the South for the same reason as Republicans had until their "permanent majority" in 1896...
...And in practice the elites were insulated despite democratic participation...
...The major difference is that governments elsewhere assume an affirmative obligation to register citizens...
...They point out that the Roosevelt majority depended on a "solid South" controlled by a white oligarchy, and that this conservative South imposed limits on the Democratic party's ability to appeal to the northern working class...
...But both of these were "tribal" as much as the elections of the nineteenth century or of 1928: Protestant versus Catholic in 1960 and white (George Wallace) versus black (Hubert Humphrey) in the South in 1968...
...Meanwhile, the northern Republicans supported voting rights legislation because they saw an opportunity to divide the Democrats...
...The politics of allocation were universalized in the service sector and in public agencies...
...It could at least be argued that the substitution of a general culture for the separate culture of the workers has been a victory for the modern secular state...
...The authors introduce their work straightforwardly: "This book is about the institutional arrangements that produce massive non-voting by lower- and working-class people in the United States...
...One election, whatever its results, could not have had such profound effects by itself...
...By 1964, the first southern president since the Civil War captured 90 percent of the Negro vote while losing the Deep South by large margins...
...They go on to argue that "the conditions favoring reform are the entry of new groups into the electorate against a background of defections among existing constituencies...
...In their view, late-nineteenth-century industrialization led to class-based movements struggling for control of an increasingly interventionist state...
...Nonvoting on the part of workers in the private sector may not be an entirely irrational response to this situation...
...If there had been same-day voting registration in Chicago, Harold Washington probably would not have been elected...
...After lower class voters were marginalized, the political parties adapted to new realities, and now function in a "conservative" manner to keep the electorate small: after all, incumbents have benefited from the size of the present electorate...
...The militaryindustrial complex acts as an upward redistribution mechanism, but so, to a lesser degree, does the City University of New York, taxing $25,000 a year workers in order to fund $90,000 a year administrators and $60,000 a year professors...
...The advantages of the fragmented state structure are that expanding electorates in some states make it possible for representatives from those states to support expansion in all states (rather on the model of northern black voting in the New Deal leading to southern black enfranchisement in the 1960s...
...The full weight of these changes was delayed through the Progressive Era, they argue, linking many Progressive trends to the later New Deal...
...They see a connection between barriers to registration and changes in the behavior of parties...
...Since the national Democrats wanted to increase minority turnout and the local Democratic white machines didn't, the new programs bypassed the "untrustworthy" locals...
...They are fighting for a good cause, but electoral politics should be the end of a movement, not its beginning...
...They suggest that turnout in the nineteenth century has been overestimated and call the politics of the era "tribalist" and "clientelist...
...They feel that "reform at the state and local level is itself a precondition to eventually winning reform at the national level...
...American registration procedures are Byzantine compared with those that prevail in other democracies...
...As one who has spent his life in electoral politics, I find myself ironically less optimistic about the possibilities to be found there than the new "converts" who wrote this book...
...The American system is affected by "shifts in the pattern of party competition, in the organization of the parties, and in the rules governing access to the ballot...
...In my own neighborhood of western Queens, the turnout per assembly district fell some 5,000 votes per district after 1973...
...The five assembly districts largely contained within the Ninth Congressional district were held by four Republicans in 1972: by 1982 all were Democratic...
...Piven and Cloward stress that quarrels over registration procedures started as party conflicts, with the dominant party trying to disenfranchise its opponents...
...It has been suggested that after 1968 the two parties fell under the control of competing New Class ideological elites tied to different parts of the government payroll...
...The United States is the only major democracy where government treats voting as if it were a privilege that each citizen must earn by overcoming voter registration obstacles...
...Piven and Cloward don't deal with the question of how to attract and hold these voters...
...While electoral rules are important, the question of how voters are mobilized is even more important...
...They seem to believe that an increase in voting would favor the present left agenda, and that point, at least, is arguable...
...The authors refer to the problems of racial turmoil and the controversies aroused by "New Politics" advocates, but take more seriously the economic mobilization of corporations and the demobilization of workers...
...There is a more philosophical point...
...A nine percent jump in Michigan registration in 1984 didn't help Walter Mondale, who got a lower percentage of the white working class vote there than George McGovern did in 1972...
...Now they have a more nuanced position: electoral action both undermines and supports collective protest...
...The authors correctly point out that informal income or education tests (caused by factors such as registration locations and hours) remain, but they don't even suggest that these restrictions have become worse in the last two decades...
...People are certified as eligible to vote automatically when they come of age and obtain identity cards, or governmentsponsored canvassers go door to door before each election to enlist voters...
...Such a politics was intensely localist, reflecting the decentralization of the national political system and the national economy...
...The requirements of registration, particularly in large cities, became ever more strict: personal registration, annual registration, early registration, and even door to door canvasses to eliminate (but not to find) voters...
...During the New Deal, non-southern turnout began to rise, as the Democratic party became the partial expression of the interests of northern workers...
...Ironically, however, Piven and Cloward point out that the biggest jump in northern turnout came not during the New Deal but in 1928, a jump which clearly was the result 'of "Protestant" and "Catholic" "tribes" opposing each other...
...Piven and Cloward note that registration obstacles are not the sole cause for low turnout...
...And if voting is linked to such factors as income, education, laws, and so on, turnout should have been rising as economic and educational indices have been rising and as the laws for voting have become less restrictive...
...In Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977), they argued that protest should "break out" of the confines of electoral procedures...
...The old parties were subjected to a variety of anti-party attacks: civil service, nonpartisan governments, printed ballots, direct primaries, and election regulations...
...Although they point out that as recently as 1970, 14 states outside the South conducted literacy tests, all those tests have now been abolished...
...But during and after World War I the repression of the American left and a swing to the right completed the development of the "system of 1896...
...This was intolerable to the older elites...
...But is it right...
...By the middle 1920s it appeared to be 504 • DISSENT Books unchallenged, and turnout reached its lowest levels in American history...
...Recent turnout patterns at the national level show that this pattern is not unique: northern turnout peaked in 1960 and southern turnout in 1968...
...However, in their concluding chapter they express optimism...
...As they put it, the Republican party galvanized itself to counter a registration effort that the Democratic party never really attempted...
...This is a clear thesis laid out clearly...
...The authors do not join in the recent celebrations of the high turnout levels in nineteenth-centuryAmerica...
...The authors recount their own experiences in the registration campaigns leading up to the 1984 elections...
...The impact of voter registration laws and procedures cannot be assessed without taking into account the motives and capacities of the political parties involved in implementing them...
...By comparison, turnout did not increase in 1932, increased only four percent in 1936, and a further one percent in 1940...
...The decline of party competition was matched by the rise of internal oligarchies in the dominant parties...
...In fact, it is probable that the policies that these prospective new voters would favor would not be those that would satisfy Piven and Cloward, or, for that matter, most of the readers of Dissent...
...Although President Jimmy Carter introduced an election day registration bill in 1977 it failed in the face of business/Republican hostility and only lukewarm support from the Democrats...
...Eventually, however, "the parties themselves became the defenders of the voter registration procedures that ensured their stability and protected incumbents...
...Socialist voting in Europe was as "tribal" as the American voter behavior of which Piven and Cloward write...
...The extreme case was in the old Confederacy, where disenfranchisement of blacks was at first carried out through fraud and force, but was institutionalized at the turn of the century through poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on...
...Panes Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, like many other intellectuals from the 1960s, have moved from anti-electoral positions to an intense interest in the American electoral process...
...In the 1970s the Democratic majority fell apart...
...Turnout was limited by a variety of means: residency restrictions, restrictions on immigrant voting, literacy tests, and, most important, voter registration...
...Their thesis really doesn't explain the decline in turnouts in the seventies...
...They conclude that the major result of the registration campaigns was that private resources cancelled each other out...
...Such analyses are simply another case of "blaming the victims...
...As Democrats became more dependent on northern black voters, their policies became more sensitive to their concerns, and they lost the votes of southern whites...
...The greatest level of mobilization in the modern American electorate comes in racially polarized municipal elections like those in Chicago and Philadelphia...
...The authors are rightfully skeptical of psychological or social explanations for low turnout by the poor, noting that these explanations simply assume the existence of what is supposedly being investigated...
...In their latest book, Why Americans Don't Vote, they confront one of the crucial problems of our electoral system: the underrepresentation of the lower classes in the American electorate...
...As the composition of the working class changed, unions failed to accommodate to it...
...If rising black voting helped the Democrats, rising white backlash helped the Republicans...
...Turnout in presidential elections in the South fell from 57 percent in 1896 to 43 percent in 1900 to 29 percent in 1904...
...If the core electorate of the Republican party is the military-industrial complex, then the core of the Democratic party is the academic-social services complex...
...A similar but slower process went on in the North, a result of the "system of 1896...
...It cannot be assumed that an increased turnout would benefit the existing left: that left would have to change and be changed by their presence...
...The implicit model for the American left has been the socialist parties of Europe, but at present European politics seems more likely to become "American" than American politics is likely to become "European...
...The last great turnout in this area was in the mayoral run-off primary of 1973, when thousands of white ethnics flooded the polls in FALL • 1988 • 505 order to elect Abraham Beame over Herman Badillo...
...The "tribes" included ethnic groups, sectional groups, and racial groups, gathering themselves under the banners of parties that provided jobs for the faithful...
...As a result of the combined effects of changes in parties and the new rules, the electorate decreased over time...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
