The Cause: The Empty Voting Booths

...There has been a similar trend in local, state, and congressional elections-and at a substantially lower level of participation than in presidential elections...

...in his forthcoming book, Where Have All The Voters Gone?, “They [the parties] managed to stand in the way of electoral chaos...

...The fact is, it is easier to vote today than it has ever been...

...Yet, none of these devices, with the possible exception of election day registration, has had any effect on the continuing trend toward declining political participation...

...This article is adapted from a speech given io ihe American Bar Associationk Commiiiee on Pariicipaiion...

...Americans believed in their parties...

...They provided electoral order, they trained political leaders, they honed the lines of political debate, they created a healthy competitive partisanship, and they offered the only possible means of translating political promise into legislative and executive action...

...Brendan Byrneof New Jersey received a“mandate”of less than 15 per cent of the eligible vote in his successful 1977 reelection bid...

...In the last analysis,” writes Everett Carl1 Ladd, Jr...

...Perhaps the principal problem facingthe United States today is the degree to which that consent is being withdrawn-the degree to which fewer and fewer Americans believe it necessary, important, or even worth their while to cast their ballots...

...Part of the problem, I believe, also lies in the destruction of certitude-the erosion of the consensus on national purpose and goals, which was forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a response to the twin crises of depression and fascism and which, in only slightly modified form, persisted until the late 1960s...

...We have emerged with our beliefs shaken,withno clear lines ofdebateand decision-making, and with a feeling of increasing confusion and inability to affect the course of public events...

...This means that the parties will have to redefine themselves in such a way as to inspire loyalty again...

...Twenty years ago it was the party that helped give us that conviction...

...nearly 100 million did not vote in the congressional elections in 1974...

...What Watergate and Goldwater did for the Republicans, Vietnam did for the Democrats, splintering their cohesion, destroying faith in their leaders, creating questions about their programs and purposes, and leaving scars and divisions that persist to this day...

...Rather it is to make clear that the explanation of the problem of declining participation lies not in the laws governing registration and voting nor in the procedures by which elections are conducted, but rather in a growing mistrust of American political leadership and a growing belief that each individual’s road to the good life runs somewhere other thanthroughthe processes of government...

...Nearly 70 million Americans failed to cast their ballots in the 1976 presidential election...

...0 The level of participation in America, while never as high as in some European democracies, is lower today than in any democracy in the world except Botswana...

...Against t h e cacaphony of the Democrats, the Republicans were the party of order, of common sense, of restraint, of probity...

...The Democrats were the party of the common man and the New Deal, the party of concern and humanity, of minorities and big city machines, the old and the young...

...When one party has become so narrow and rigid as to constitute political irrelevance, and the other has become so broad and contentious as to be able to promise little and deliver even less, when there is no real shared conviction that in casting a ballot a citizen will be doing anything to improve either his own well-being or that of the nation, it is little wonder that fewer and fewer Americans are bothering to vote, and an increasing number of young people are eschewing politics altogether...

...The figures are appalling: During the last decade more than 15 million eligible Americans, many of Curlis Gam is the director ofthe Committee for ihe Study of the American Electoraie...

...there was a sense of party loyalty and party pride that you don’t see in America today...

...The party that would create new programs or the party that wanted to control the federal budget?It seemed to stand for all things, all at once...

...Senator Henry Jackson “won” the 1976 New York presidential primary by garnering less than six per cent of the potential vote...

...There was sufficient certitude in the public mind of where the two parties stood that citizens-proud, loyal Democrats and equally proud, equally loyal Republicanscould pull the party lever in the ballot box without knowing the candidate involved and feel relatively confident that they knew what they were voting for...

...Within the last decade and a half the poll tax was outlawed, discrimination at polling places on the basis of race or language was prohibited, young Americans between the ages of 18 and 21 were enfranchised, residency requirements were eased, unreasonable and inequitable registration dates were discarded, and many states initiated devices to increase the level of participation, including mobile registrars, post-card registration, expanded voter information efforts, and even election day registration...

...Whatever is done needs to be done soon, for what we have now-a system where special interests that have come to represent fewer and fewer of us have increasing power, where single issue zealots have learned to use their votes to gain a virtual veto-power over local candidates-will only perpetuate the non-participation of the rest of us...

...1978 Curtis Gam whom were regular voters, have stopped voting altogether...

...Whichisnot tosaythatthereformsof the 1960s should bediscarded...

...What is needed are new approa/ches to meeting the problems this country faces today...

...Thus disillusioned, many Republicans opted for political independence or nonparticipation...

...Was it the party of hope or the party of lowered expectations...

...I do not presume to have all of those answers, but three factors seem obvious as part of the reason for the decline...

...In politics, television has meant, among other things, the rise ofthe“mediacandidate” and his consultants and technicians...

...The Voting Rights Act allowed millions of blacks to vote, but black voting is declining at about the same rate as the rest of thenation...

...Mobile registrars, post card registration and the like have made it easier for citizens to register, but registration has been declining as well as voting...

...They have been the way America turned its political desires into governmental policy...

...The Goldwater counter-rebellion, in which a vocal, ideologically rigid, rightwing minority became a major, and in some regions controlling, force in the Republican Party, outraged many traditional, common-sense Republicans...

...0 Not only is turnout-the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote-decreasing, but a smaller percentage of Americans are even bothering to register to vote each year...

...As we entered the 1970s, as the problems the country faced grew in number and complexity, it becamenear impossible to say, for sure, what the Democratic Party stood for...

...In the last four presidential elections, the percentage of eligible Americans who voted decreased from 63.8 in 1960 to 54.4 in 1976...

...The Politics of Selfishness The Cause: The Empty Voting Booths by Curtis Gans The crucial difference between democracy and other forms of government, it is said, is that in a democracy the leadership of the nation derives its legitimacy and support from the consent of the governed...

...Fewer Americans are now disenfranchised, at least in national elections, because they move, but the level of participation in voting for president continues to decline...

...The first is the influence of television...

...To get it back again, to get people voting again, we need a reemergence of political parties...

...Three specific events of the 1960s undermined the popular pride in and commitment to the two major parties...

...This redefinition of parties might be done along conventional liberal/conservative lines, but it doesn’t have to be that way...

...Fewer than 28 per cent of Jimmy Carter’s fellow citizens voted for him for president in 1976...

...These events may help explain why some of the decline in participation initially occurred...

...The I978 primary turnout has been down in almost every state except Arkansas and California...

...Mayor Ed Kochwas the“choice”of1essthan 12 per cent of New York’s voters...

...The Erosion of the Two Parties Many of the reasons for the decline in participation and the corresponding erosion of public faith in government and political leadership are obviousWatergate and Vietnam, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, the growth of a massive, unresponsive and impregnable bureaucracy, the growing complexity ofthe issues Americans face and their growing doubts that anybody has the foggiest ideaofwhat todoabout them, and perhaps a feeling of betrayal, or at least disillusionment, that all the glorious promises and all the furious energies of the 1960s seem to have yielded so little...

...they do not, however, explain why it continues and what might be done about it...

...That confidence and loyalty to parties helped make people want tovote, made people feel theirvote was necessary and important...

...The sum total of these reforms represented the conventional wisdom of the 1960s as to how more Americans might be brought to the polls...

...But a major reason for the new American dilemma may lie with the erosion of the two-party system and the two major American political parties...

...As a result of Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to the war, which forced Democratic loyalists to support not only Johnson but his war as well, the party became polarized, its center collapsed, and no new center was created to replace it...

...They did, in fact, much more than that...

...A Redefinition of Parties One way to reverse the decline in voter participation, then, is to bring about a reawakening of party loyalty...

...Conventional Wisdom of the 1960s This sharp, continuing decline in political p a r t i c i p a t i o n occurs, paradoxically, at a time of unprecedented liberalization in the procedures and laws governing registration and voting...

...We went into the 1960s sure of our beliefs and our parties, with an understanding of what was at stake in our political decision-making and certain of our ability to make an impact...

...Those answers lie deeper within the American system...

...0 Even in California, only about 40 per cent of California’s eligible voters turned out for the heralded Proposition 13 initiative, nearly ten per cent lower than the number of eligible voters who cast their ballotsin the 1976 presidential election and nearly 20 per cent fewer than 1972 totals...

...Millionsof young people were made part of the political process, but a disproportionate share of them have failed to avail themselves of their newfound right...

...Watergate shocked their sense of probity and moral superiority...

...The decline in participation at the ballot box andwithincommunity political and social institutions has been simultaneous with the advent of television as a central factor in the lives of most Americans...