Turnout smackdown - Book Review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2002 by Brent Kendall

THE VANISHING VOTER: Public Involvement in the Age of Uncertainty by Thomas Patterson Knopf, $25.00

ONE MONTH BEFORE THE 2000 New Hampshire primary, Al Gore and Bill Bradley attempted to differentiate themselves on health care, gun control, and leadership in front of a national cable audience. At the same time, the World Wrestling Federation presented its latest installment of "WWF Smackdown!," which attracted four times as many viewers. This anecdote, recounted in Thomas Patterson's The Vanishing Voter, sums up the author's frustration at the level of civic interest in the United States.

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes American culture's secondary emphasis on community more than the public political apathy and anemic voter-participation levels of the past quarter century. Though presidential and congressional midterm election turnout among eligible voters has declined only slightly since 1972, Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that the confounding (and depressing) truth is that turnout hasn't increased, in spite of all the reasons participation should have grown. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race enjoyed a 63 percent turnout rate, while Bush-Gore limped in at 51 percent.

Political scientists have theorized that a better-educated citizenry should be a more involved one. Yet in 1960, half of the adult population hadn't finished high school, and fewer than 10 percent held a college degree, while today, one in four adults holds a degree, and another quarter have attended college in some fashion. In addition, less than one third of Southern blacks were registered for the 1960 election, and turnout among women lagged 10 percent behind that of men. Today, blacks vote at the same rate as whites, women the same as men. Throw in the 10 million registrants added to the rolls by the 1993 Motor Voter Act, and you ought to have a recipe for civic participation.

That it hasn't happened says much about our age, and it's not all bad. Only in a stable society with relative peace and prosperity do citizens have the luxury to choose civil disengagement without suffering heavy consequences. That said, Patterson argues that the process is wanting, and faults candidates, journalists, and the political parties for a civic environment that is far from citizen-friendly. "[O]rdinary Americans share some of the blame for their lapse in participation," he writes. "But most of the fault lies elsewhere, and citizens cannot be expected to rededicate themselves merely because they are told their democracy needs them"

Patterson's book, though, isn't just another tired lament about the lameness of the American political process. It's an extension of the Vanishing Voter Project, designed to discover "what draws people to a campaign and what keeps them away" Patterson's suggestions for improving the electoral process are distilled from analysis of 80,000 interviews project workers conducted with citizens during the 2000 presidential campaign. Many of the project's findings aren't new or surprising; they're just backed by more extensive data. The public finds the campaign long and tedious. When media coverage of the race decreases, public interest decreases. People would rather hear candidates in their own words than pundits talking about them. They believe special interests drive the political process. They think the Electoral College is unfair.

Patterson calls upon the parties to make the primary season shorter and create a system that permits more states to have a real voice in selecting nominees. He says the media should remain skeptical, but should also give politicians credit when it is due, and calls upon the networks to televise extended one-on-one candidate interviews. And he argues that states should lengthen poll hours and make the registration process more voter-friendly.

Many of his suggestions would surely benefit the process, but even Patterson admits that his prescriptions can do only so much to enliven democratic involvement. He concedes that, at the core, healthy turnout is inextricably linked to voter motivation. If citizens don't care enough to vote, the level of procedural ease and efficiency won't matter. Patterson argues that the lower level of today's political stakes has naturally reduced people's interest in politics. He suggests that absent deep social problems, the parties have ceased to argue big ideas, and now largely battle over the means to reach mutually agreed-upon ends. Bush and Gore both wanted to fund a prescription-drug benefit program, but W. aimed to spend $158 billion to Gore's $253 billion--not exactly differences that lead to shouting across America's dinner tables. There's also a generational aspect. "The civic-minded generation raised during the Depression and the Second World War has been gradually replaced by the more private-minded X and Y generations that lived through childhood and adolescence without having experienced a great national crisis," he writes.

Last fall's terrorist attacks may have given younger citizens their own taste of national crisis, but Patterson seems to doubt that the event will spark long-term enthusiasm for public involvement. His prediction is proving prescient: This July, after Patterson's book was headed to the printer, the Center for the Study of the American Electorate released a report on early 2002 primary turnouts, and the numbers weren't good. "Someday it would be nice to report something other than gloom and lament--that somebody was doing something commensurate with the scope needed to reclaim the vitality of American democracy," said Curtis Gans, the committee's director.