NONVOTING, DISTRUST, AND CIVIC NEGLECT
Some might argue that high reelection rates simply reflect the public's satisfaction with its representatives. Were this the case, one would expect that at least half the population would have very favorable views of local, state, and federal public officials. As suggested in chapter 1, however, public confldence in government is low. Taking a closer look at public trust, table 4 shows that only one in twenty American adults have "a great deal" of confldence in their public officials and political institutions, and roughly one-third have "very little" confldence in them. More qualitative research has also found evidence supporting the claim that the majority of Americans feel "shut out" of government and have come to "hate" the political process.[88]
Not only is public confldence in representative institutions low, it is in decline. As mentioned in chapter 1, 17 percent of respondents in 1974 had "a great deal of confldence" in Congress, but only 8 percent reported the same view in 1994. Twenty-one percent expressed "hardly any" confldence in Congress in 1974, and 39 percent held this view in 1994. In 1974, 64 percent of respondents agreed that "public officials
| Institution | A great deal (%) | Quite a lot (%) | Some (%) | Very little (%) | No answer (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 460, based on Gallup survey Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1996). | |||||
| Local government | 5 | 26 | 43 | 23 | 2 |
| Federal government | 5 | 18 | 44 | 31 | 2 |
| Congress | 3 | 12 | 42 | 39 | 4 |
| Political organizations, parties | 4 | 11 | 39 | 43 | 4 |
When placed in a broader context, some of this decline in public trust actually may have been healthy. In his history of American public life, Michael Schudson points out that "there can be too much trust as well as too little." High public trust in the 1950s and 1960s partly "reflected a moment of unusual consensus in American life held together by Cold War paranoia, middle-class complacency, postwar affiuence, and the continuing denial of a voice in public life to women and minorities." Thus, "Some of the skepticism about major institutions today is amply warranted…. Then again, some of it seems to express a deeper alien ation and aimlessness.[90]
This alienation manifests itself in the perception that American elected officials do not represent the public. Reviewing 1995 data introduced in chapter 1, table 5 shows that depending on the words one uses, 60–88 percent of Americans agree that representatives are insincere and unresponsive to the real concerns of the public. Whereas nearly two-thirds of Americans in 1964 agreed that "elections make the government pay a good deal of attention" to the public, only 42 percent held that view in 1996. Or, in more general terms, in 1964, 32 percent agreed that "the government pays a good deal of attention to what people think," but only 15 percent held that view in 1996.[91]
It is not so much the political institutions themselves that people distrust—it is the people elected to represent them within those governmental
| Statement | Strongly Agree (%) | Total Who Agree Statement (%) |
|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Alan F. Kay, Locating Consensus for Democracy (St. Augustine, Fla.: Americans Talk Issues Foundation, 1998), 2. | ||
| Government leaders tell us what they think will get them elected, not what they are really thinking. | 61 | 88 |
| Government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want. | 55 | 79 |
| Politicians work for themselves and their own careers, not the people they represent. | 41 | 73 |
| The government is run for the beneflt of special interests, not to beneflt most Americans. | 37 | 70 |
| Government leaders are out of touch. They don't know or care about what's going on in the rest of America. | 30 | 60 |
Along with deep public distrust, the number of eligible American citizens who do not vote concerns many political observers. Though many bemoan the "steady decline" in American electoral participation,[94] voting in major elections has not changed dramatically in recent decades. The more important point is that turnout remains very low. Table 6 shows that voter turnout in presidential general elections has not declined dramatically since 18- to 21-year olds were given the right to vote prior to the 1972 election. Roughly half of the electorate has voted in each presidential general election for the last seven elections. During the forty years prior to 1972, turnout for the eligible electorate ranged from 51 percent (Truman-Dewey in 1948) to 63 percent (Kennedy
| Main Presidential Candidates | Turnout (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Federal Election Commission. Data available at http://www.fec.gov/pages/electpg.htm. | ||
| 1972 | Nixon–McGovern | 55 |
| 1974 | — | 38 |
| 1976 | Ford-Carter | 54 |
| 1978 | — | 37 |
| 1980 | Carter-Reagan | 53 |
| 1982 | — | 40 |
| 1984 | Reagan-Mondale | 53 |
| 1986 | — | 36 |
| 1988 | Bush-Dukakis | 50 |
| 1990 | — | 37 |
| 1992 | Bush-Clinton-Perot | 55 |
| 1994 | — | 39 |
| 1996 | Clinton-Dole-Perot | 49 |
| 1998 | — | 36 |
Voting rates for most elections are lower. Even-year general elections usually draw out substantially more voters than do primaries, odd-year general elections, and local and special elections may bring out as little as 10 percent of the electorate. Those who show up on election day also tend to stop voting as they reach the lower-proflle races farther down the ballot. This process is called voter "roll-off" or "drop-off." From 1972 to 1996, for example, there was usually a 3–5 percent drop-off from presidential to House elections nationwide. That means that one in twenty citizens counted as voting did not, in fact, do so in the congressional elections. The drop off for lower races is much more substantial. As an illustration, table 7 shows the extent to which voters in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, "dropped off" as they went down their ballots. For example, 8 percent of those who went to the polls or fllled out absentee ballots declined to vote for a state corporation commissioner, and when they got to a state Supreme Court retention election, in which they had the choice of retaining or rejecting a sitting justice, 22 percent declined to vote. Drop-off of this magnitude is common, and uneven drop-off among different voting groups can make the voting population even less representative of the larger population.[96]
| Public Office | Ballots without a Vote (%) |
|---|---|
| SOURCE: Bernalillo County Clerk. Data available at http://www. bernco.gov/clerk/election.html. | |
| NOTE: Offices are listed in the order they appeared on the ballot. To reduce table size, some offices have been omitted. The Supreme Court retention election gave voters the option of voting "for or against" a sitting justice. | |
| U.S.President | 2 |
| U.S. Senate | 3 |
| U.S. House of Representatives | 4 |
| State Corporation Commissioner | 8 |
| Court of Appeals, Position 1 | 11 |
| Supreme Court (retention vote) | 22 |
What is the source of persistent nonvoting and drop-off among those who do choose to vote? One view is that nonvoting reflects public complacency or approval of government.[97] Low public trust and confldence in government, however, suggest that nonvoting reflects frustration and alienation more than complacency and satisfaction. Another view is that nonvoters are engaging in a meaningful form of public protest. For example, the radical activist Erwin Knoll argued that his vote would count the most if he refused to cast it. A willful nonvoter once suggested a more indirect protest to an interviewer: he didn't vote because he didn't want to "encourage them."[98] Given the ineffectiveness of this form of protest, it is not surprising that research on nonvoting flnds no support for the protest explanation.
Together, deep public distrust, nonvoting, limited candidate scrutiny, and even ill-defined public opinion are signs of a growing civic neglect. As explained in chapter 2, when dissatisfled citizens fail to use their vote (and their voice), their inaction constitutes neglect of the system. By declining to register their disapproval, citizens permit poor representation to persist. Even in those cases where public officials do face serious challenges to their incumbency, because of the public's inattention and superflcial candidate evaluation, strategically sound challengers would be mistaken to focus their campaigns on a substantive critique of incumbents' public records. Genuine policy debate on a complex issue wins few voters during campaigns, which are more commonly characterized by misleading accusations, personal insinuations, and one-sided attacks.[99] Exchanges between candidates are more vitriolic
This pattern of civic neglect, nondeliberative campaigning, and questionable representation has self-reinforcing qualities. As James March and Johan Olsen argue in Democratic Governance, "Political actors act on the basis of identities that are themselves shaped by political institutions and governance."[101] Individuals' experience of the political process shapes their understanding of themselves, their civic capabilities, and their understanding or "accounts" of the process itself. The electoral process described in this chapter leads voters to conclude, as Murray Edelman argues, that voting is closer to "self-expression" than powerful political action. Repeated lessons in futility are likely to engender a helpless or cynical self-identity as a voter, cause civic skills to atrophy, and lead to even more skeptical beliefs about the value and impact of elections.[102] Then, in turn, "voters who are left feeling that they are not represented are very likely to feel alienated and detached, and as nonparticipants they are unwilling to shoulder the sacriflces that may be required to promote the common good."[103] When this detachment leads to nonvoting, it further weakens the effectiveness of elections by making the remaining voting population less representative of the general public.[104]
When this process is repeated over time, it reinforces some of the very problems that lead to hasty candidate evaluation, distrust, nonvoting, and misrepresentation. To put it mildly, the American electoral process does not appear to be a self-correcting system. Instead, the extreme difficulty of challenging unresponsive elected officials fosters a civic neglect that further erodes the electoral process.